The Gamma Option (26 page)

In his mind he could hear the pilot issuing a report back to the command center of the O.K. Corral, perhaps speaking to base leader Doc Holliday himself. A car had wandered into their territory and overheated. No sense making a big fuss. Just send some help fast or call the nearest Triple A. Wareagle had stayed hunched in the backseat the whole time the chopper was overhead. That way the report would mention only one man present, which was what they had to think if Blaine’s plan was going to work.

“
You have entered an air force gunnery range area and are in extreme danger,
”
came the obligatory call over the chopper’s PA system. “
Please leave with your vehicle immediately. Repeat, please leave with your vehicle immediately
.”

McCracken threw up his arms helplessly once more and then pointed in frustration at the engine. He made sure they could see him shrug. He saw the pilot’s hand signal before the chopper swung round and headed back to the west and the O.K. Corral.

“How long you figure it’ll be before they can get help to us, Indian?” he asked when Wareagle had emerged from the backseat.

“My guess would be ten minutes, maybe fifteen. We’re close, Blainey.”

“Spirits tell you anything specific about the Corral we’ll soon be heading for?”

“A prison, Blainey, where the souls of the past loiter in the present without regard for the future.”

“So what else is new?”

As Wareagle had predicted, the jeep came kicking dust down the single unpaved road inside of fifteen minutes later. Blaine made a show of stepping away from his still-open hood and waving his arms again as is if to attract the driver. The jeep was marked in the colors and symbols of the air force, but the two men inside were dressed in civilian clothes.

“Am I glad to see you!” he shouted out when they pulled their jeep up not far from him.

They stepped down wordlessly, facial features obscured by the dark-tinted goggles each wore to keep the desert dust from their eyes while riding in the open jeep.

“What’s the problem?” one of them asked.

“Bastard overheated. Should’ve known not to trust a rental in these parts.”

One of the men pulled off his goggles to reveal a pair of expressionless eyes. He nodded to the other who headed back to the jeep.

“I really appreciate your help,” Blaine said. “Hey, you boys air force, or what?”

The man said nothing, just stood there.

“Well, thank the boys in the chopper for me, too.”

At the jeep, the second man had just reached into the back for a water jug when Johnny Wareagle rose from behind it and latched a hand over his wrist so he wouldn’t foolishly try for a weapon. Meanwhile, McCracken more crudely rammed a fist into the stomach of the man nearest him. The man doubled over and Blaine followed the blow up by slamming him hard under the chin. His head snapped back in whiplash and he passed out instantly. Blaine turned to see Wareagle approaching with a slight grin etched over his leathery face and the man he’d downed hoisted effortlessly over his shoulder.

“You must learn to be subtle, Blainey.”

“You know what they say about an old dog, Indian.”

“Perhaps. But the teeth remain sharp and dangerous still.”

“So long as he doesn’t try and change his bite.”

They drove the rental car a short way off the single dirt road and camouflaged it as best they could with brush. By the time they climbed into the purloined jeep, its previous two occupants had been bound, gagged, and stored in the sedan’s back and front seats. Blaine had left the windows partway down to make sure they’d have air. He drove the jeep with Johnny Wareagle in the seat next to him. They had donned the large tinted goggles worn by the other men both to shut out the spray of desert dust and to mask their features. Since the men from the O.K. Corral were dressed in civilian clothes, they didn’t feel their own garb would be a problem.

“Rover One, this is Holliday,” a voice squawked over a mobile radio beneath the dash when they were six minutes into their drive west. “You boys plan on making a report anytime soon?”

Blaine made sure to hold the mike well away from his lips when he responded. “Assistance rendered. On our way in.”

“No reason to be so formal about it. See ya for lunch, boys,” Holliday said, and signed off.

The tall steel fence came into view a bit under ten minutes later, just before they swung up the last of a rise that descended quickly into a valley at the foot of Arizona’s Maricopa Mountains.

“I don’t see a checkpoint,” Blaine noted. “No guards to concern ourselves with.”

“Electronic surveillance,” Wareagle put forth. “Cameras mounted on or near the fence. The gate will be opened from a monitoring station if we’re permitted to pass through.”

As they drew closer to the fence, more signs alerting them to the presence of an air force gunnery range were visible, plastered all over the steel link.

“Wish I could,” Blaine said out loud in response to the boldest sign of them all, one ordering all newcomers to TURN BACK NOW!

They reached the gate and could do nothing but wait. When it did not slide open immediately, McCracken inspected it from the driver’s seat to see if he could ram the jeep right through and up the last of the rise. Probably could have, but it was a bad idea. If they couldn’t gain legitimate access to the O.K. Corral, the thing to do would be to circle round from the side on foot and make their entry at night. But the gate slid sideways at last and Blaine drove through it after a glance at Wareagle. He continued the uphill climb and saw in the rearview mirror that the gate had closed behind them.

“Once we get there, we’ll still have to find Bechman,” he said.

“The spirits would not have let us come this far if that was not their intention,” Johnny told him.

“Let’s hope so.”

The early afternoon sun beat down on them and Blaine felt his flesh seeming to wilt. The dry desert heat had his mouth tasting like dust, and he was about to reach back for one of the jeep’s water jugs when the rise suddenly leveled off to reveal the valley beneath them. Blaine’s eyes bulged behind his goggles.

“Jesus Christ, is that a mirage, Indian, or am I crazy?”

“It is indeed an illusion, Blainey, but not meant for us.”

In the valley before them, a perfect town had been built with unpainted wood. The only tall structure was a church steeple on the outskirts, and Blaine distinguished freshly sodded parks and even a bubbling stream around which the entire secret retirement community had been constructed.

“Certainly has all the comforts of home,” Blaine commented, and he started the jeep downward.

As they drew closer they could see that virtually all the structures were one-story in design, and all were equipped with wheelchair ramps as well as steps for easy entry. Everything had been built in consideration of the O.K. Corral’s residents, many of them old or infirm.

He slowed the jeep briefly at a sign posted off the road where it turned to pavement, a sign painted far less professionally than the previous ones and bearing a wholly different message:

WELCOME
TO THE O.K. CORRAL!

“Guess we should take them up on the offer, Indian.”

“Why not?” Wareagle shrugged.

And McCracken headed the jeep on into the makeshift town. They kept their goggles on, ready now to abandon the jeep at the first opportunity. Everywhere they looked were indications of time gone wrong. The place was laid out like an old-style western town. Each of the small shops had its own hand-carved or painted sign above its doorway, which furthered the illusion still more. There was an ice cream shop and even a small movie house featuring posters of coming attractions and a marquee boldly advertising the latest bill. They drove the jeep past a parklike setting lined with canopied tables around the pond. Many of the tables were occupied by figures snoozing, staring, or reading a book or newspaper.

“Think they got their own printing press, too?” Blaine wondered.

“Why not?” Johnny Wareagle responded. “They’ve fabricated their own reality here. They want time to seem frozen, unchanged. The residents will have no means of noting the passage of days that way. They lose touch with what they were before coming here, who they were.”

“Turned docile and quiet, behavior modification taken to a new level. Jesus Christ, Indian, when you think of all the secrets stowed within the minds in residence here… .” He slid the jeep on, taking in the sights passed on the way. “Think the library has a preferred reading list?” Blaine asked as they edged past it.

“Of more concern to us now, Blainey, is whether or not the sheriff’s office over there has cells.”

“Whoops.”

Blaine swung the jeep beyond the sheriff’s office and made a left turn, coming to a halt before a bakery featuring the smell of fresh-baked breads and cookies floating through its open doors.

“All the comforts of home, eh, Indian?” Blaine repeated.

“A lie, Blainey, meant to disguise the truths of the past, to bury these truths from the world they were perpetrated on.”

“A graveyard for secrets, in other words.”

“And a resting place for the souls of men before they are ready to join the spirits.”

They climbed from the jeep and headed for cover. Suddenly an old man with a shock of gray hair stormed out the door of the bakery waving his arms and yelling at them.

“How do you expect my customers to get in with your damn machine blocking the door?”

“Huh?”

The man wiped his hands on his stained apron. Blaine thought he looked vaguely familiar.

“Rush starts soon. Get your machine out of the way. Scat now! Scat! Damn law-and-order people never cared a damn for the needs of anyone else. Always taking, always taking. Jesus …”

The old man disappeared back inside the bakery shaking his head.

“We’d do best to move the jeep, Blainey.”

But Blaine’s mind was elsewhere. “I know that man,” he said slowly. “I know I’ve seen him before… . Shit, his name’s Kirkland. He was Allen Dulles’s number one operations man with the old CIA under Kennedy and Johnson. What the hell is this place?”

“Just what we expected it to be.”

They had returned to the jeep now and were backing it into another slot before the bookstore, since it looked closed today.

“They must have given the residents jobs,” McCracken surmised.

“And thus a purpose, aimed at making them forget what their purpose was before they arrived. Their very existences have been redefined.”

“Drugs?”

“For a time, probably. But these men have outlived their eras. With nothing to go back to, they would welcome the new way of looking at themselves.”

“Like us, Indian?”

“I don’t think they have beds ready for us yet.”

“But think about it. In a manner of speaking, we’ve outlived our eras too. Yet instead of coming to a place like this to play checkers and fish, we redefined our lives on our own terms. Not much different than these folks when you look at it that way.”

They were only a few steps away from the jeep when a loud voice rang out from just behind them.

“’Bout time you boys got back. The Doc was startin’ to worry up a storm, I tell ya.”

McCracken, closer than Johnny was to the speaker, turned slowly to find a tobacco-chomping icy-eyed man dressed like a western gunman, albeit without the six-gun. Blaine shrugged and cut the distance between them routinely. The man’s eyes fell on Wareagle.

“Hey, wait a minute, you’re not—”

He had started to go for his walkie-talkie when Blaine was upon him, his grasp harsh and painful. The man looked at him and spat tobacco on the neatly paved road.

“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.

“Ike Clanton, and that there’s my little brother Billy. And unless you’re Wyatt Earp, I’d say you’re in a heap of trouble.”

The man spat again. “This some kind of joke?”

“Oh, yeah. The joke’s called the O.K. Corral, and the punch line’s got to do with some half-assed cowboys running herd on a bunch of old men.”

Blaine started to ease himself and his captive down the road with Wareagle on the deputy’s other side.

“This is a U.S. government installation, mister. I don’t know who or what you are, but you’re in a heap more trouble than you know and it’s getting worse by the second.”

They reached the bookstore, and a quick shoulder from Wareagle had the locked door swinging open. The trio passed inside and Blaine immediately passed the guard to the huge Indian. Wareagle responded in turn by grasping the man around the neck in a death lock that shut off virtually all his air.

“I haven’t had a good day,” Blaine told the man who was straining up on the tips of his toes to lessen the pressure being applied to his throat. “In fact, I’ve had a pretty lousy week, lousy enough to not care much at all if the Indian has to break your neck. ’Less, of course, you tell us what we’ve come to find out.”

The icy-eyed man struggled for air and a stream of chalky brown tobacco juice dropped onto his white cowboy shirt.

“You’ll never get away with this.”

“Interesting cliche. Shame to waste it. We’re looking for a man named Hans Bechman. Used to be a German scientist until he signed up with this nuthouse.”

Wareagle allowed the guard some welcome breath. “No names, not real ones anyway. They never tell us any real names.”

“This one would be in a wheelchair,” Blaine explained further, recalling Bart Joyce’s description of the man he had seen directing the loading of cannisters onto the
Indianapolis.

“Lots of people here in wheelchairs, mister.”

“This one would have come in one. Heavy German accent, too. Know the man?”

“No.”

“You’re lying. I can tell by your eyes. Look, friend, there’s a new sheriff in town and he’s about to snap your neck. Last chance. Know him or not?”

Wareagle increased the pressure and lifted the guard off the floor.

“Yes! Yes!”

Again Johnny let up on the pressure and eased him part of the way back down.

“Lives in number forty-nine,” the captive deputy said. “Almost never comes out. Keeps all to himself.”