Occultation (35 page)

—Funny thing, she said. —I dreamed this would happen. A couple of nights ago.

—Dreamed what?
Flip, flip, flip.

—The video monitors went on the fritz. You screwed them up, somehow.

—Did I spill a glass of scotch into the works?

Now she
did
look at him. —Tell me you smuggled in a bottle of single malt.

—In fact, I did. We’ll save it for a special occasion. Anyway, I meant that Tommy Billings and his love of booze might’ve been responsible for the Siberian debacle.

—You’re kidding, she said.

 —Listen, this is good. I’m surprised you haven’t heard. The team was partying  at three o’clock in the morning and TB got a little crazy and dumped a full glass of liquor into some circuitry. It started an electrical fire and
whoom!
The site went up like a torch.

—Color me dubious. That’s too convenient.

—Less titillating than the espionage rumors, alas.

—Who told you?

—I don’t recall. And I was sworn to secrecy.

—The jerk was probably drinking vodka. What with it being a joint project with the Russians. That adds a nice touch of verisimilitude, don’t you think?

—Sure, why not? We’ll never know. None of them are around anymore. They froze pretty quick.

—If there was no one left to tell the tale…. she said.

He said, —…then how come we have the legend of the Manitou? Boy follows stag up a mountain—

She said,  —…boy discovers stag ain’t no stag. That’s easy—it’s a
story
. As in a bedtime story. Just like TB killing everybody with a glass of hooch. Although. 

—Yeah?

—Accepting the hearsay as true for a moment, if Tommy really did something like that, it might’ve been on purpose.

—Where do you get that?

—I met him once at a cocktail party. Doctor Toshi Ryoko and the boys had just gotten back from Japan—the Devil Sea thing, I think—and the department threw them a shindig.

—Oh. I wasn’t invited.

—I’m shocked! You’re such a people person!

—You think Tommy was working for another team?

—Sure, why not? He struck me as the type.

—The type?

—Yeah, you know, an asshole. He was a farm boy who made good.

—No call to hack on farm boys. They’re the backbone of this great union.

— Give me a break. Those days are history. One driver on a machine does it all. It’ll be robots in a few years.
Steelworkers
are where it’s at.

—I’m sure, I’m sure. “Allentown” was a mighty sexy song. So why do you think ill of the late, lamented Tommy Billings? Did you catch him exchanging passwords with an FSB operative by the punch bowl?

—No, it was just subtle things. TB stumbled around all night with a bottle in his fist, dopey as a cow. He was too stupid to be true…he had a shifty glint in his eyes. Toshi loved him. Toshi collects guys like that. These days he’s got this Aussie goon named Beasley to carry his spears. Ex-rugby star, or something. Ugly, but sort of beautiful too. I know a girl in the Denver office who balled him. She was pretty high on the whole experience.

—Toshi. You’re on a first name basis with him? Cozy. Got a key to his chateau, do you? No wonder you’re on the fast track.

—Don’t be jealous. I don’t think Toshi likes girls. He’s married to the media frenzy, and busting the chops of all those academic enemies he’s made.

—Jealous? I’m so far beyond all that, you don’t even know.  Since they’d broken it off after the job in the Sierras, he’d said this very thing to himself so many times it had become a fact.

—Getting your money’s worth out of your therapist?

He laughed again. It was growing harder not to match her naked antipathy, and it had only been eighteen days. Twenty, if one counted the flight from Seattle to Yakima and the interminable briefing, then the ninety-minute chopper transport into the hills. He said, —She keeps the top two buttons of her blouse undone. I cannot complain.

—Liar. You’ve been watching those straight-to-video flicks starring Shannon Tweed. You poor lonely bastard.

—I’m going to retrieve the footage at B5 and B6. He stood and stretched, and opened the gun cabinet. He checked the action on the rifle, a sleek 7mm with a Leopold scope, and slung it over his shoulder. —Be back in a jiffy.

—Do try to return before dark, or I won’t let you in.

—I’ll hustle. Gonna be chilly tonight.

She wasn’t listening.

The module was a hemisphere nestled in a clearing among sagebrush and junipers. It was constructed of composite plastic with viewports of thick, shatterproof glass, and segregated into several compartments. The module was designed to function as a self-sufficient habitat, sturdy enough to withstand vast temperature swings and powerful winds that howled out of the northwest from the high desert. Lights and surveillance equipment were powered by a pair of generators and, because this was an inordinately sunny part of the state, a battery of solar panels. Thus, all the comforts of home: TV, microwave dinners, solitaire on the sadly outdated computer, even very brief showers. A thousand gallons of water sat in storage. The chemical toilets were designed to separate solid and liquid waste. Garbage was incinerated, composted in the tiny hydroponics cubicle, or packaged to be shipped home during resupply. This was a minor, but long-term operation. The pair would stay for six months conducting field work, then rotate with the next team.

He shut the entry hatch. He wore a camouflage jumpsuit with a heavy belt. On the belt: canteen, knife, walkie-talkie, and a pouch containing waterproof matches, a screw-on flashlight, a compass, antivenin, and trail mix. In his left hand he carried a rucksack containing batteries and tapes for the remote cameras.

The Family’s ranch sprawled for thousands of acres under skies that, come sunset, darkened like blood edged in molten gold. Homesteaders grabbed every parcel they could lay hands on during the 1880s when dirt was cheap. Not that it resembled a ranch—nor had it functioned as one since the 1960s when the Family took it over. Cowboys would refer to the vista as rough country, an expanse of rocky steppes, and canyons, and in the near distance, limestone ridges that gradually built into mountains. A coyote behind every bush, a rattlesnake under every rock. At night, the stars shone bright and cold, and he could count the pits and cracks in the moon, it hung so full and yellow.

Not far south, things were greener, softer; the original settlers raised cattle and horses, once upon a time. Headquarters provided him an assortment of area maps—according to these, a road cut the property in half and connected it to the nearest town, forty-five kilometers south. HQ told him not to worry about ground transportation. Supplies would be brought in by helicopter and, in the event of emergency, he and she would be airlifted to safety.

He adjusted the timer on his watch and headed northeast, toward the mountains. A horse would’ve been nice—a big, soft-eyed pinto to carry him through this Howard Hawks landscape. At least he’d the smarts to bring an appropriate hat instead of the god-awful baseball caps and sun visors the CSIs wore. The hat was of crumpled, sun-bleached leather and it once belonged to a vaquero who worked in Texas. The vaquero went home to Mexico to be with his wife when she gave birth, and bequeathed him the hat as a token of friendship. It chafed his ears because it was hard as an old leather football left to dry in the mud. He took it off and beat it against his knee, used it to sop the sweat streaming from his face. Once the oils of his flesh got in there, it would loosen and fit his head. 

He walked. 

The coyote den was located amid the root system of a copse of shaggy pines. Its size and elaborateness still surprised him. Generally, coyotes chose to lair among rocks if they couldn’t co-opt the abandoned shelters of other animals. His work here proved a bit more intrusive than he preferred. He’d installed cameras to monitor den entrances. The cameras were encased in waterproof boxes and mounted on trees. After days of zero activity, despite his squirting synthetic musk on nearby bushes, he resorted to inserting a probe into the den—the probe was a flexible tube attached to a braincase. The case was affixed to a wooden stand. He spent hours manipulating the device, mapping the labyrinthine interior via the infrared eye ring. Ultimately, he positioned the eye in a central burrow and programmed the VCR to record at certain intervals throughout a twenty-four-hour cycle. 

The company spared no expense for equipment, and he’d lain awake the past two and a half weeks turning that over in his mind. In his experience, corporations were loath to part with a penny more than circumstances absolutely required—the crappy computer in the module, and the lack of a jeep or four-wheeler, as exhibits A and B. The exception to this rule being the opportunity for great profit, or in the interest of mitigating some potential risk to their reputation. The government wanted people here, had selected his company of all the best North American subcontractors, to perform studies and collect data, but their motives remained unclear. Need to know, they said. It was enough for him to track and film and file the reports. The whole thing was likely on the level. What else could it be, anyway? Nonetheless, he found it simplest to distrust people until proven wrong, a product of spending most of his adulthood dwelling alone in shanties and shacks, of lying motionless in a thousand lonely coverts, spying upon the beasts of the woods. 

He changed the batteries on all of the cameras and swapped out the cassettes. There was still time, so he withdrew the probe and spent an hour navigating it into an entrance on the opposite flank of the den. Then he sat in the shade and drank some water and chewed a handful of trail mix, and wondered why, despite the heat, a chill tightened the muscles in his shoulders and neck. He glanced around with affected casualness. The trees shifted in a mild breeze. A cloud partially occulted the sun.

Without question, spoor indicated several coyotes lurked in the vicinity. Bizarrely, the tracks didn’t approach the den, but rather circled it, and he envisioned them creeping about the bushes, fearful, yet inexorably drawn and entrapped by simple fascination. This was beyond his twenty years of experience in the wild. Certainly one would expect an extended family to dwell inside such a massive den. He found its desertion, the haunted house quality, disquieting to say the least.

This disquiet, this aura of strangeness, permeated the entire northern sector of the range. The patterns were off, the behaviors of fauna uncharacteristic. The other day a hawk fell from the sky, stone dead. He’d seen gophers curled up in the middle of a field, oblivious; a murder of crows had slipped from hidden roosts and followed him for several kilometers as he scouted the surroundings. The birds swooped and circled in utter silence. The preceding CSI team had witnessed even more disturbing things—a pack of coyotes sitting patiently beyond the campsite, and a black bear that watched from the cover of a juniper. After a couple of days stalking them, the bear walked right into camp, grabbed one of the techs by the arm, and tried to drag him away. They shot it and sent its head to the lab. The CSI team decided it must be rabid. No rabies, though. Just a fat and healthy five-year-old boar with devilry on its mind. And that’s why he carried a rifle.

The canyon wasn’t far. Its jagged walls averaged a height of ten meters. A stream trickled along its floor where squirrels and mice nested in the heavy clusters of brush; numerous bird species, including thrush, gray catbirds, and canyon wren, occupied the mossy crevices above. Red-tail hawks and great horned owls hunted the area.

He picked his way through the boulders and alder snags. Sunlight was blocked by the narrow walls and overhanging bushes. It was cold. The open range, its long sweeps of baked dirt, seemed a world removed as he traveled farther into the shadows. He carried the rifle in his right hand, against his hip. He would’ve been happier with a shotgun in the brush where matters could escalate in seconds. There was no bear sign—and he’d been most scrupulous in ascertaining that detail. Still, he couldn’t shake his unease. He’d noted it from day one, put it down to heebie-jeebies from the stories in the paper, the briefings and the short film recovered from Site 3. After all that, he went to a bar and drank the better part of a bottle of Maker’s Mark, as if that might obliterate what he’d seen. Site 3 lay a kilometer west where the foothills verged on mountainous. The forensics people referred to the area as The Killing Grounds. The excavation had dragged on for three weeks and the teams only verified the presence of half a dozen bodies. The forensics experts estimated more, probably
many
more, victims had decomposed beyond detection, much less retrieval. Eleven sites total, but the economy was crashing like the
Hindenburg
and the state was too broke to keep digging. He thought maybe
afraid
to keep digging was closer to the truth.

He’d left a pair of cameras trained on a small pool. There were significant animal signs in the immediate vicinity—they’d captured footage of mice and birds, and a bobcat on its nightly prowl. The bobcat sat there by the water, its eyes shiny and strange, and finally it zeroed in on the second camera, which was fairly well camouflaged, and stared—stared for exactly eleven minutes until the machine clicked off.  He could only speculate how long the cat waited in the dark. Then he thought of the bear and tightened his grip on the rifle.

When he reached the covert, the cameras were missing.

He arrived home after dark, and she had indeed locked the hatch. He knocked and she let him in anyway. The central space, their work area, was lighted by the warm, mellow glow of three accent lamps she stowed in her luggage. Fluorescent lighting made her edgy—she claimed to have suffered a near breakdown during an expedition into a remote region of the Pyrenees. 

He unpacked the cassettes and piled them on her desk for processing. Processing film was her main task, although as a geologist with specialties in zoology and insect ecology, it likely chafed. As the amount of data to sift was paltry thus far, she spent a portion of her days investigating the immediate environs. She showed him one of a series of jars she’d collected that afternoon.