The Dig: A Taskforce Story (2 page)

The drive from the makeshift range inside Francis Marion National Forest back to our office in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina took close to forty minutes. We spent the time with small banter. I tried to stick with the shooting, but she kept bringing the questions around to what to expect at Assessment and Selection. I gave vague answers, which annoyed the hell out of her.

As the name implied, Selection was all about figuring out who was or was not a good fit for our little top-secret organization. There were plenty of physical skills that I was more than willing to help Jennifer hone, but at the end of the day, as I’d told her, it was mental. Giving away the secrets of what to expect would only taint the entire experiment. She needed to go into it cold, just like every male before her had. The minute anyone thought I’d given her an “answer key,” she’d be dismissed out of hand.

Not that she wasn’t going to get dismissed anyway.

Getting her a shot at A&S was proving damn near impossible. I hadn’t told Jennifer, because I didn’t want her to lose what little enthusiasm she had for the training, but so far it was being roundly dismissed. Since she had no military or intelligence experience, the entire notion was being treated as ridiculous. With all the fighting to get her in, her failing never crossed my mind. Neither did her reluctance to attempt it in the first place.

We pulled into our brand-new office on Shem Creek, a marsh-front, townhouse-looking building that we leased for a song due to the depressed real estate economy in Charleston. Apparently, the previous tenant was some bank/brokerage/investment firm that had packed up its bags in the middle of the night and fled, leaving a healthy mortgage that had to be paid by the landlord.

Jennifer questioned whether our little company even needed an office, but I was adamant. An office meant we were real. More than just a handshake between us. Much harder to sever ties—which was something I greatly feared she would do. Besides, it was right down the street from a couple of great creek-front bar and grills.

I parked out front and let Jennifer get the door while I secured the firearms. By the time I’d gotten inside, she was on our little desktop computer, reading an e-mail with a look of wonder on her face.

We hadn’t gotten around to renting a full-on office suite, so we shared the single desk, the rest of the room open with a scratched hardwood floor and a single vinyl chair in the corner, left over from the previous tenants.

I opened a closet door and pulled out a weapons cleaning kit, the pungent smell of Hoppe’s No. 9 solvent filling the room. I sat in the cracked vinyl La-Z-Boy, small bits of stuffing coming out, and broke down the 1911, saying, “What’s up?”

Still reading, she said, “It’s from my brother. He got us a job.”

“Job? What are you talking about?”

“Remember I told you about my brother? The reporter in Dallas? He did some story on UFOs in Roswell, New Mexico, and while he was there he ran across a guy in the preservation society. Apparently, there’s a site the guy believes contains Indian artifacts near the banks of a stream off the Pecos River. The owner of the land is about to build a dam there, burying the site underwater.”

She looked at me as if that mattered, then scrunched her eyes when I apparently missed the glaringly obvious point.

I said, “And? So what?”

“Really? And they need someone to prove it’s an actual archaeological site. My brother told him about us locating the temple, and the guy subsequently found that article in the
Smithsonian
magazine about our trip. He wants to hire us to consult on the site so he can get a court order to stop the dam.”

“Why us? He’s in a preservation club, right? Surely he does this all the time.”

She scowled, not liking the logic of my words. Enamored of the thought of getting to dig around some old pottery shards, she was willing to ignore the obvious.

She said, “I don’t know. Maybe he wants an outsider. Maybe he’s already exhausted his internal ability. What difference does it make? He’s willing to pay us.”

“Jennifer, we don’t have time for this. You’ve got about three months before Selection, and we need every second of it.”

She said nothing for a minute, then popped a hole in my balloon. “Pike, I heard you talking to Kurt. I know you want this really badly, but they’re never going to let me go. You need to face that.”

As the commander, Kurt Hale was ultimately the person who would give her the green light to attend. He’d called yesterday to find out how our company was coming along, wanting to start seeding it with “employees” from the Taskforce, and I’d immediately begun needling him about Jennifer and A&S. He’d blown up, telling me in no uncertain terms she wasn’t going. Period. I hadn’t realized Jennifer had heard.

I said, “That’s just him talking. I’ll get him to agree, and when he does, you need to be ready. He’s not going to wait. We don’t have the time to waste going to New Mexico.”

“Pike, it won’t take long. All we need to do is confirm or deny the presence of an indigenous civilization, then write a report. He’ll do the rest. Just let me give him a call and figure out the left and right limits.”

Knowing I was going to lose, I said, “We go, and you still have to train in the evenings. Okay?”

She gazed at the ceiling as if praying for patience. She said, “Let me call first. It might all be a moot point.”

* * *

A. J. Sweetwater hung up the phone and said, “They’ve agreed to come.”

The man he knew as Chris said, “And will they be able to stop the dam?”

A.J. hoisted his jeans up over his hips and said, “They can slow it down. Long enough for you to do what you want.”

“That’s sounds suspiciously like what you said originally. When I paid you the first time. Your word alone, as the president of the Historical and Preservation Society, would cause a pause in the work. That didn’t happen. Now you want me to pay more money.”

Sweetwater heard a veiled threat and wondered if Chris was lying to him about why he wanted the dam stopped. Claiming to be a member of one of the many nutty UFO groups that clung to Roswell like a bad rash, he’d stated there was evidence of an alien crash on the rancher’s land and his group wanted to find it. But he acted like none of the alien groupies that Sweetwater had met in the past. Slightly off-kilter folks, wearing clothes out of date and always talking about the latest theory on the Roswell incident so long ago, they could be spotted from across the street. Not so with Chris. No, wearing what looked like expensive clothing for a safari, Chris rarely said a word and had a cloud of menace about him.

Sweetwater said, “I’ve never had a rancher say no to me in the past. Most everyone lets us at least explore for Native American artifacts. We bring in these experts and we’ll have official paperwork backing up our claim.”

“Why them? Why not someone from here? Aren’t there government agencies that do this?”

“Well, yeah, but I didn’t think you wanted any government types involved. On top of that, we need someone from out of town. The stuff I planted will fool an outsider, but someone who makes a living looking at New Mexico archeology will know it’s not kosher. I can call them off if you want.”

“No. No government. When will they get here?”

“They said they’d fly in today, so I can see them tomorrow morning.”

“Okay. I’ll pay for their services, but they’d better slow down the process. My people need some time to search. If this doesn’t work, you’d better learn to scuba dive.”

Sweetwater smiled at the joke, the grin sliding off his face at the absolute lack of humor on Chris’s face.

Jennifer tried one more time to break Pike out of his foul mood, but he was having none of it. He’d climbed behind the wheel of their rented pickup full of gear, and let her ride shotgun as the sole conversationalist with Mr. A. J. Sweetwater in his own Ford F-150.

An affable farmer-looking guy with a wispy mustache and a pronounced Adam’s apple, Sweetwater was dressed like everyone else she’d seen in Roswell—blue jeans, leather belt, plaid shirt, and straw cowboy hat. He didn’t seem like he had a doctorate in American history, but that’s what he claimed.

Pike had been grouchy since they’d woken up this morning. She’d walked down the hall and knocked on his door, the cheap hotel varnish doing nothing to add weight to the seriousness she felt about their mission. He’d answered buttoning his shirt, noticeably having not shaved. She knew he’d done it because it aggravated her. He’d been trying to push her buttons since they’d flown out from Charleston the day before.

They’d gone down to the free breakfast and Pike’s attitude had grown worse.

“This is the breakfast? Some bananas with black spots and a box of doughnuts?
I
should have found the hotel.”

Now getting a little piqued, she said, “This is what Mr. Sweetwater recommended. I didn’t think you tough guys cared where you stayed.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like paying for bed bugs. I should have moved us last night when we saw the place.”

“You couldn’t. This is where they’re shipping the ground-penetrating radar.”

He’d said, “Ground-penetrating what?”

“Pike, it’s an archaeological dig. I can’t just look at the dirt. We need to see if there’s anything under the ground. Walls, wells, graves, that sort of thing.”

“Who’s paying for this shit?”

She told him. And that’s when he’d really become grumpy.

Jennifer, riding with Sweetwater, made sure their pickup with Pike at the wheel was still behind them, then turned back around to the front just as Sweetwater took a left turn off Highway 2, heading east on a dirt road, bouncing along and leaving a dust cloud like a mini-tornado in their wake. She said, “How much farther?”

Sweetwater said, “’Bout ten minutes, give or take. How long will it take to get this done?”

“Depends on the size of the plot. From what you said, we should be able to finish in a day. I did my research on the flight over, reading through the archives from the Office of Archaeological Studies at the Museum of New Mexico, so I’m up to speed on what to expect.”

Sweetwater looked a little queasy at the statement, something Jennifer tucked away for no good reason. Just a tidbit that was worth filing in her subconscious. She continued, “As a matter of fact, they’ve done quite a few surveys around here, locating sites from both the Ceramic and Archaic periods. Why didn’t you just have them do the investigation? It was no trouble getting them on the phone, and they seemed a little surprised that you’d brought us in.”

Sweetwater looked downright nauseous at her words. He fumbled a little with the radio dial, trying to get something to come in, then said, “Well, that’s mighty big of them to say that now. All I care about is preventing the loss of indigenous artifacts, like an Apache migratory campsite or some other settlement. When I talked to them, they said they’d put it in the queue for survey, but that wasn’t going to work with the dam being built.”

Jennifer took Sweetwater’s words at face value, catching Pike’s visage behind the wheel in the side mirror, all venom and disgust at the entire effort, bouncing along behind them and eating all their dust. She focused back to the front, smothering a smile.

She’d spent a great amount of time trying to figure out what made him tick, and had given up. Whenever she thought he was intolerant or chauvinistic, he would end up surprising her, showing a softness that was completely out of character.

He could be more trying than any man she’d ever met, but she held the edge and she knew it. Pike could threaten all day long, but there was a connection with him that was real. She knew, beyond the grumpiness, no matter what she did, he liked her. Which was a high school way of saying he had a crush on her, and also pretty much summed up their relationship. A sort of twisted juvenile bond between grown adults. A stagnant level she tolerated because his ability to connect had been short-circuited by the loss of his family. Pike might be capable of killing men with a soda straw, but he had no skills operating in her world, and it was so easy to twist him about, something she enjoyed. Up to a point.

Pike had once saved her life at great risk to his own, with nothing for a reward other than the fact that she’d lived, and she would never forget that. He could stomp and scream all he wanted, with her tweaking him at will, but at the end of the day she would do what he asked. And he would do the same in return.

But it
was
fun tweaking him.

They bounced over a set of cattle guards and Jennifer saw the line of foliage marking the Pecos River off on the horizon, a small tributary from it snaking out in the desert scrub-oak toward them. Sweetwater pulled the truck up short and she saw construction in the distance, a bucket-loader with piles of sand next to it.

The dam.

Sweetwater said, “Well, this is it. You see the tractor up there? That’s the head of the dam. From there to here I’ve found some artifacts, but I’m not sure if they’ve just been washed out by the river, or if this is really a settlement worthy of excavation. As you know, the river has probably moved two hundred feet in the last hundred years, so what I need is your official call on whether we can get an injunction on that dam. He gets it built, and whatever is here disappears.”

Having stopped behind them, Pike came up in time to hear the end of the conversation. He said, “Who owns the land? They know we’re here?”

“Yeah, they do. They’re continuing to build, but told us we can search as long as we want. Well, as long as we can, I guess.”

Jennifer exited the vehicle and saw Pike scowl about something. She glanced back and caught Mr. Proper Farmer Sweetwater gazing at her bottom as she stepped down. Which would be enough for Pike to start cracking heads just to let off some steam. He had no tolerance for anyone treating her as anything less than a scientist. Sweetwater caught the glare and quickly wandered down the stream bank, staring at the ground.

She quickly opened the tailgate and said, “Give me a hand with the GPR.”

Pike said, “Yeah, great. Three thousand dollars against a profit of two thousand. Sure. Let me help you with that.”

He leaned in and grabbed the outside edge of the cradle for the ground-penetrating radar, an all-terrain chassis that looked like a shell for a lawn-mower engine, only with larger wheels.

She saw his aggravation building and decided she’d had about enough. It was time to curb his little tantrum, and she knew she could. She brushed up against him and said, “Hey, I found a gym near our hotel. I told you I’d work while we’re here. We can’t shoot, but we can do the grappling stuff. Right?”

He jerked the chassis to the ground and stood up, wiping his brow. Glaring at her. She said, “Okay, stop the crybaby crap.” Well, she said that on the inside, anyway. Outside she leaned into the bed of the truck and pulled the GPR unit toward him, waiting.

She felt him slide in next to her, grasping the outside edge of the GPR, their bodies touching, and knew she’d won. But she didn’t dare show anything.

He said, “All right. You want to find a bunch of old pottery shards, I guess I can waste a few hours. But you’ll pay it back on the mat.”

She looked at him and saw the same unshaven, gruff growl. She elbowed his short ribs and he jerked away, grinning. And just like that, they were back on an even keel.

Jennifer heard Dr. Sweetwater shout something and left the GPR setup to Pike, running over to see what he’d found.

He said, “See! Right here! There are artifacts on the edge of the stream. Out in the open. This was a settlement.”

He held up what looked like an arrowhead, and she bent down, picking up some pieces that may or may not be ceramic shards. She gently set them aside and said, “Well, maybe, maybe not. This is a floodplain, after all.”

Sweetwater scowled and said, “This should be enough for further exploration. Write it up.”

She said, “I will. After I sector the land with the GPR.”

Pike came over dragging the lawnmower device, the GPR now settled inside. Sweetwater said, “Okay, okay. We’ll talk to you at, say, nine
A.M.
tomorrow?”

Jennifer said, “Sounds good.”

By the time he’d driven away, Pike was grumbling about the terrain, pushing the ground-penetrating radar over the rocks, manhandling it every fifty seconds.

She caught up to him and said, “Hey, something strange is going on here.”

He jerked the GPR forward, saying, “You mean besides me just running this thing back and forth without knowing what I’m looking at?”

She grinned at him and said, “You don’t even have it calibrated.”

He stopped and wiped his brow again, grinning back. “Okay, smart-ass. What’s so damn strange?”

“Sweetwater led me right to a couple of artifacts, but they’re completely out of time with each other. There’s no way both are sitting at ground level.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re both old as all get-out, but way, way out of time. It’s like someone from a thousand years in the future found a stone axe and a microwave oven. They don’t match.”

“So what are you saying?”

She fiddled with the keyboard of the GPR, going through the sequence to get it calibrated for the terrain they were on. She said, “I’m not saying anything yet. They
could
have been exposed by flooding here in the riverbank, and not tied to each other. Let’s get a grid search with the GPR. We don’t find anything with it, and we can write this off.”

Pike started pushing, muttering, “You mean write this off as a tax loss?”

She gave him a hip check, and he smiled. Telling her he was okay with the entire trip.

They had traversed about two-thirds of the available terrain, finding nothing, when Jennifer said, “Whoa. Stop right there.”

“What?”

“There’s something here.”

She bent down and stuck a little flag in the ground, saying, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s only about a foot down. Since it’s in the floodplain, it might be an old log. But it also might be the remains of a pueblo wall.”

When she heard nothing, she looked up, seeing Pike gazing into the distance.

“What?”

“Someone’s coming. From the other side of the creek.”

She looked up and saw a dust cloud approaching at a high rate of speed. A four-by-four slid to a stop opposite them. A man wearing one of those ubiquitous straw hats and sporting a full mustache exited. With a shotgun.

Pike immediately went into combat mode, pushing Jennifer behind him and getting ready to fight. The man stormed across the creek, heedless of the ankle-deep water. He never brought the gun to bear, but the threat was there nonetheless.

He said, “What the fuck are you two doing on my land?”