Track of the Scorpion Page 5

  “Which leaves spit for the rest of us,” reporter Mark Douglas fired back.

  “Show a little respect. I’m about to hand you a scoop on a platter. What would you say to an all-expense-paid vacation to a desert wonderland?”

  “Look out the window,” Douglas said. “Albuquerque is the desert.”

  Smith beckoned to his reporter. “You’ve lived too long in California. This is the real world. Now, step into my parlor, my boy, and I’ll make you famous.”

  Groaning for effect, Douglas grabbed his cane, levered himself to his feet, and maneuvered past the two intervening desks to reach the Journal“s city editor. The editor’s desk, like its siblings throughout the vast, carpeted newsroom, was a mixture of metal and plastic masquerading as wood.

  “How long has it been since your accident?” Smith asked.

  “Damn near three months.”

  “Take it from me, what you need is exercise, fresh air, and sunshine. You don’t want to start making a career out of being a gimp.”

  Douglas rolled his eyes. The Journal“s fresh-air policy had gotten his leg broken in the first place, the first day the newspaper’s no-smoking policy had gone into effect. After two hours of on-the-job abstinence, Douglas gave up on his gum and ran for the fire exit to light up. Only he hadn’t counted on one of Albuquerque’s infrequent rainstorms turning the metal stairway into a ski jump.

  Douglas hadn’t smoked a cigarette since, though the craving still haunted him, particularly after meals. After sex was supposed to be a big deal, too, but you had to have a girlfriend to appreciate that.

  “What do you know about Cibola?” Smith asked.

  “Please, not another of your treasure hunts.”

  “Humor me.”

  Douglas limped back and forth, trying to work the stiffness out of his leg. “If I remember my history, Spanish explorers roamed New Mexico sometime in the sixteenth century seeking Cibola’s fabled seven cities of gold. Why the hell they bothered, I don’t know. One look at this godforsaken state should have told them that the Indians were lucky to survive, let alone amass riches.”

  “The explorer we’re talking about is Francisco Coronado,” Smith said. “Practically our patron saint.”

  “If you say so.”

  “What I say is that our beloved Coronado wasn’t looking hard enough, because I’ve found the gold, right in Cibola where it should be.” Smith swiveled around in his chair before charging the twenty-foot wall map, where he stabbed a finger into the state’s northwestern badlands. “For the benefit of foreigners like yourself, let me explain that the state of New Mexico has a town named Cibola.”

  Douglas moved close enough to the map to see a minuscule dot.

  “That was their mayor on the phone just now,” Smith went on. “The silly bastard’s sitting on one hell of a story and doesn’t know it. I strung the gazooney along until he agreed to pay your expenses. Hell, one call to a TV station would have got him a chopper in there, with live coverage if the satellites are in working order.” The editor thumped the map with the palm of his hand. “But as of now, this exclusive is all yours.”

  Douglas eyed the map. Cibola’s part of New Mexico was color-coded white, like a salt flat. “Hold it.” He snatched up the day’s edition of the Journal and turned to the weather section. Cibola wasn’t listed, but the nearest town of any size, Thoreau, showed a temperature of one hundred and ten degrees. “No, you don’t. I’m on restricted duty. Doctor’s orders.”

  “Like I said, don’t start coddling yourself at your young age. Besides, it can’t be more than a hundred miles to Cibola. And a hundred ten is a spring day. Hell, we used to play doubleheaders in worse than that when I was on the university baseball team.”

  Exaggerating his limp, Douglas collapsed onto the metal folding chair next to Smith’s desk, the one everybody in the newsroom called the “hot seat.”

  Smith returned to his own cushioned chair and phoned the research department. “Bring me the latest edition of the National Geographic. Now!”

  To Douglas, he added, “Cibola’s found itself an old World War Two airplane buried out in the boondocks. Maybe it’s a B-17, though it’s too early to be sure. Whatever it is, I want you there when they dig her up.”

  “Who’s „they’ and who’s doing the digging?”

  “That’s the kicker. They’ve got themselves a couple of experts. Very famous archaeologist. Elliot Scott, for one.”

  “I thought he was supposed to be an authority on the Anasazi Indians.”

  “He is, he is, but he’s got a daughter. She’s our hook. Ah, here comes our magazine now. I’ll show you what I mean.”

  Smith nodded a thank-you at the editorial assistant, then handed the National Geographic to Douglas. “Turn to the article on New Guinea.”

  Once Douglas had the proper page, Smith took back the magazine, glanced around the newsroom to make certain they weren’t being overheard, then did a Groucho Marx imitation complete with raised eyebrow and imaginary cigar. “Tits and nostalgia, that’s what sells newspapers. The daughter in question is Nicolette Scott, called Nick for short.” He held up her picture for Douglas to admire.

  “What kind of plane is that behind her?” Douglas asked.

  “Jesus Christ, I think maybe you broke more than your leg on those stairs.”

  Douglas knew better than to fight back.

  “I want close-ups of this lady archaeologist,” Smith went on, “cleavage if you can manage it.”

  Douglas sighed. Smith was all talk. Catch him away from the Journal, where he wasn’t living up to some long-gone image of the hard-bitten newsman, and he was a pussy cat. If Douglas actually substituted sex for an honest-to-God story, he’d find himself back on obituaries, praying for mass murder to fight off the boredom.

  “Any chance of taking a photographer with me?”

  Douglas asked, hoping that someone else might do the driving.

  Smith shook his head. “Aim and shoot, that’s all you have to do with these new cameras.”

  Nodding his acceptance of the inevitable, Douglas said, “What’s my deadline?”

  “God knows how long it will take them to actually dig up the thing, but I want you in at the start just the same. As long as we don’t tip our hand to TV, you can sit on it until you’re ready. You’d better drive down tonight, though, in the dark when it’s cool. Take a cellular phone with you just in case you run into trouble on the highway. I wouldn’t want a tenderfoot like you on my conscience.”

  Douglas smiled.

  “Don’t get cocky, and don’t think you can take the rest of the afternoon off, just because I’m letting you drive at night. I want you on the phone to the air force. Find out if the bastards have lost any planes.”

  Sure, Douglas thought, he’d look it up in the phone book. The air force would be there certainly, listed under the U.S. government, but he doubted there’d be a subheading for missing fifty-year-old bombers.

  Smith must have read his mind. “Start with Kirtland Air Force Base, fer Chrissake. It’s just south of town, the last time I looked.”

  Clenching his teeth, Douglas hobbled back to his desk.

  “You might try Captain Ken Roberts,” Smith called after him. “He’s the press liaison officer out there. You can mention my name to the asshole. You never know, it might be worth something. And knock off the limp. I’m not feeling sorry for you.”

  Smith was still laughing when Douglas made the call, feeling as if he wasn’t fit for much more than obits at the moment. Captain Roberts didn’t help bolster his confidence when he immediately put Douglas on hold. He was still holding when Roberts called back on another line.

  “Sorry about that,” the captain said, “but when someone tells me he’s a reporter I always make sure who I’m talking to. Now, what can I do for you?”

  Briefly, Douglas outlined the situation, that he was on his way to Cibola to check on reports that a World War Two bomber had been found in the desert.

 
“I’m looking at our maps now,” Roberts answered. “There were a lot of bases in New Mexico during the war, but I don’t see any that were designated for bomber training. Mostly fighter squadrons, I think, but I’d have to do some research to be sure.”

  “We’ve been told some archaeologists are already on the scene.”

  “Let me put you on hold again and check a couple of my history books.”

  Douglas was starting to crave a cigarette by the time Roberts came back on the line.

  “I hope you’re not on a wild-goose chase,” the captain said, “but I can’t find any documentation that there were bomber bases in the area. Of course, that doesn’t mean a plane couldn’t have gone down in the desert. If it had, though, you’d think we’d know about it. We’d also have picked up the pieces. Most likely, that’s all you’re going to find, a piece of a plane or something. Still, I wish you luck.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you kept quiet about this for the moment,” Douglas said.

  “You can count on me. I’ve been press liaison long enough to know the importance of an exclusive.”

  The smile left Captain Roberts’s face the moment he hung up the phone. Journalists were a pain in the ass. Even if you made them happy, they wouldn’t take the time to thank you. But rile them and they’d be on you like a pack of wolves. Either way, you lost.

  He left his desk to check the map one more time, aligning the benchmarks to make absolutely certain that the plastic overlay was positioned correctly. There was no mistake. Cibola and environs were well outside the security zone that encircled Los Alamos and its testing grounds. Of course, the no-fly zone must have been larger during the war. No doubt there’d been fighter bases to enforce it.

  Roberts shook his head. That was ancient history, just like he was. Too old and too long in grade. If he didn’t make major on the forthcoming promotion list, he’d never survive the next cutback. If that happened, ten years would be shot to hell.

  Ancient history or not, he decided to follow the first rule of military survival: cover your ass. A memorandum for the record was the usual method, to be filed for future bailouts. Only this time, he decided, he’d buck a copy up to the CO, Colonel Fortunato.

  Colonel Joseph Fortunato waited until Captain Roberts left his office before slumping in his chair. All he wanted to do was coast through the next five months until retirement. No bumps, no waves, that was the way to a short-timer’s heart.

  He groaned. The captain’s memo was more than a bump. It was a goddamn roadblock. And he couldn’t ignore it, not if he wanted to survive. Of course, if blame needed to be assessed, he would dump everything on Roberts, who was going to be passed over for promotion anyway.

  With that decided, the colonel opened his safe and went to work. The classified files on the Los Alamos security zone made no mention of lost airplanes. But there was a red flag, dating from 1945, that said all unusual inquiries concerning the security zone, or vicinity, should be forwarded to the Pentagon, Washington, D.C. No name was given, only a unit designation: S-OPS17.

  Fortunato did the arithmetic in his head. The likelihood of anyone from S-OPS17 still being alive was remote enough, let alone being on duty after so many years. But he didn’t like the term vicinity, not one damn bit. It was too vague, too unmilitary. Every order, red flags included, should have specific map coordinates; that was his idea of how things ought to be done.

  Christ, vicinity could mean a neighborhood or a theater of war. In Fortunato’s case, the vicinity to worry about was five months. A quiet, hundred-fifty-day neighborhood was all he wanted, not some goddamned war zone with a red-flagged career killer.

  On top of everything else, he’d never known a red flag designation to remain in effect so long. No doubt it was the usual clerical screwup, but technically—as long as the red flag was there—security measures were still in effect.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Here we go.”

  Once he responded to the red flag and set things in motion, it would be like an insect landing in a spider’s web. Even if the spider was long gone, the vibrations would continue and sooner or later someone was bound to get stuck.

  Sighing deeply, Colonel Fortunato addressed a classified cover sheet referring to S-OPS17—as prescribed by red flag procedure—and fed it into the scrambled fax machine, then repeated the process with Captain Roberts’s memo explaining the press inquiry.

  The moment SAC Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, acknowledged receipt, Fortunato shredded everything.

  CHAPTER 6

  Nick examined her plate like a true archaeologist, probing the Zuni Cafe’s dinner special, pot roast à la mode, as if in search of buried artifacts. What she unearthed was a chestnut dressing garnished with apple slices.

  “You might as well eat it,” her father said. “You know Mom Bennett, she only serves one entree a night. If you don’t finish it, you won’t get dessert.”

  Clark Guthrie, who was sitting across the booth from Nick, peeled back the sliced pot roast that was hiding the dressing and tested it for himself. “Am I missing something?” he said. The Zuni Cafe was full, as it always was on Wednesday, pot roast night. Last Wednesday Nick had thought ahead, stocking up on bread and cheese from the general store.

  “Nick has nightmares about dressing,” her father said. “Underdone turkey stuffing damn near killed us all when she was a child. When it came to cooking, my wife, God bless her, had her mind on other things.”

  “Like waiting for you to come back from one of your digs,” Nick put in.

  “When it came to food Elaine was totally dyslexic. Isn’t that right, Nick?”

  She ignored the question, variations of which she’d been hearing for years, and speared an apple slice with her fork. When she brought it to her mouth, it smelled of sage and sausage. In a heartbeat, the aroma erased Cibola and replaced it with Thanksgiving at home. Nick was eleven again, setting the table with white linen and sterling, following the pictured instructions in one of her mother’s etiquette books, and hoping her father wouldn’t get home too soon and spoil the surprise.

  “You ought to try this dressing,” Guthrie said. “It doesn’t taste a bit like turkey stuffing.”

  With a sigh, Nick gingerly nibbled one of the apple slices. Her stomach knotted instantly. She knew it was a conditioned reflex, that memory was overriding reality, but she couldn’t help herself. She got up, excusing herself to go to the bathroom, where she flushed away the mouthful she hadn’t wanted to spit out in public.

  By the time she got back to the table, her father had eaten her portion of pot roast and dressing, leaving her to cope only with the potatoes and string beans. She thanked him with a flickering smile, wondering if she’d ever be able to tell him the truth about that disastrous Thanksgiving dinner. He’d been out of town the entire week before, she remembered, called away to an unexpected dig made necessary because an Anasazi site was being threatened by an unusually heavy storm.

  His first words coming through the front door had been, “Thank God I got back in time for one of your Thanksgiving dinners.” He’d swept both Nick and her mother off their feet with a two-armed hug.

  Prompted by the memory, Nick looked up from her plate and said, “You know how Mother hated your field trips.”

  With exaggerated deliberation, Elliot put down his knife and fork, then wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Your mother never complained. She knew it was my job. I don’t remember you complaining, either.”

  “Would it have done any good?”

  “I hate coming in on the middle of a soap opera,” Guthrie said. “Maybe I should go back to the motel and watch television.”

  Elliot shook his head. “Pay no attention, it’s a family ritual. True archaeologists digging up the past and paying no attention to the present or the future. Your mother always said my homecomings were like having a honeymoon all over again.”

  But she didn’t tell you about sitting in the dark, Nick thought. Day after day spent in h
er pajamas and robe, with the drapes and blinds drawn, unable to summon the energy or will to dress herself. Talking only when asked a direct question, leaving the housework and cooking to Nick. Her mother’s moods of black depression, which she had once described as being trapped at the bottom of a well with glass walls that defied climbing, had haunted Nick’s childhood.

  “Mother told me once that she never worried about losing you to another woman,” Nick said, “only to a major archaeological find. She said you were obsessive.”

  Elliot was about to respond when Gus Beckstead arrived, along with Mom Bennett’s hot apple Betty topped with a mountainous scoop of vanilla ice cream.

  “1 know your tricks, Gus,” Mom said. “Don’t expect dessert without paying for dinner first.”

  “He can have mine.” Nick moved over in the booth so Beckstead could squeeze in beside her.

  Mom shook her head. “Don’t think I didn’t see how you treated my pot roast, young lady. Nobody leaves my place hungry. Now you eat your apple Betty and I’ll bring another plate for Gus, not that he deserves it.”

  Beckstead waited until he was served and Mom Bennett was out of earshot before speaking. “Good news, Professor. I’ve got your men. Four cowboy diggers ready and waiting to start first thing tomorrow morning. I told them to be there at six A.M. so we could get a jump on the heat.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” Elliot said.

  “I told you about it,” Guthrie said. “Gus here’s the prospector who found a plane buried out in the desert.”

  “Where?”

  Beckstead provided directions.

  “I thought it was all talk.” Elliot condemned his daughter with a hard-eyed stare.

  “Don’t blame me,” she said. “I didn’t know he’d be able to come up with the money.”

  Beckstead grinned. “The mayor and his council kicked in. They figure it will be good for the town, having their own B-17 on display. Do you want me to pick you up in the morning?”

  “I’ll manage to get there by myself.”

  “Don’t forget what I told you about the deep sand out there at my oasis. Stick to the road and my tire tracks.” Beckstead lowered his head and went to work on his apple Betty.