The Gates of Babylon (3 page)

“Hand me the phone,” Jacob said to David.

His brother handed it over. A man’s lightly accented voice answered on the first ring.

“Is this Scorpion?” Jacob asked. He had a hard time not putting air quotes around the man’s nickname.

“Where are you?”

“Small change in plans. We’re meeting at the head of Bryce Canyon National Park. East on Twelve. Do you know it?”

The man’s answer was low, suspicious. “You said north of Panguitch. I’m all the way up by Circleville.”

“We’re short on fuel,” Jacob lied. “It took everything we could to fill the tanker.”

“I can’t get there by four a.m. It’ll be four twenty at the earliest.”

“If that’s what it takes. You’ll find us behind Ruby’s Inn.”

The other man didn’t answer for so long that Jacob thought he’d lost the call. Even the satellite service was getting spotty these days. But at last the man grumbled that he would be there.

They continued in silence over the darkened landscape. Once outside the valley, they had passed occasional vacation homes in
the wooded hills, dark and deserted, but twice, when they drove by ranch houses, lights turned off suddenly at their approach. An hour now and they hadn’t spotted a single vehicle on the road.

It had been more than a year since Jacob visited Bryce, during a quick trip with his brother and their boys, Daniel and Diego, when Jacob needed a break from the pressures of running Blister Creek in the wake of his father’s death and in the face of opposition from the church graybeards. That was before the climate crisis.

At the time, the place was packed. German and French hikers, scruffy backpackers unloading cars with Colorado and California plates. Young men with huge packs and backcountry permits hiking from the rim down into the otherworldly red rock landscape of the canyon. At the overlooks Jacob met families from New Jersey and trim, strong-backed seniors with walking sticks and plenty of sunblock. Cars, campers, motor homes, and tour buses with Japanese lettering on the side.

Nothing like that now. No cars on the road, no shops or motels open on their approach to the park. The wind carried smoky wisps of snow across the road. So far it was only a dusting across the high plateau, but the first serious storm would isolate this place in a way it hadn’t been for a hundred and fifty years.

“You still think we’ll pull out of this?” Stephen Paul said.

“I’m having doubts,” Jacob admitted.

“You get people starving and the very idea of a national park sounds kind of silly.”

“Nobody in this country is starving,” Jacob countered. “It’s gas at ten bucks a gallon and lawless roads that shut this place down. Anyway, we pulled out of the Great Depression—we’ll pull out of this, too.”

“Did Ruby’s shut down in the Depression?” David said. “Far as I know, it didn’t.”

Jacob didn’t have an answer to that.

The closer they got, the more ominous it seemed. The village itself had become a ghost town, the shops boarded over, the gas stations dark and quiet. Ruby’s Inn, which had sat at the mouth of the park for nearly a century, didn’t have a single light on. Stephen Paul turned on his headlights when he pulled into the empty parking lot. When the lights raked the big glass windows on the side of the main building, they illuminated the enormous hotel gift shop, once filled with Native American jewelry, racks of T-shirts, bins filled with trilobites, quartz crystals, and fake arrowheads, but now empty.

Jacob lifted his eyes to the upper floors of the hotel, looking for a flashlight or a face in a window, but saw nothing. So far as one could see from the parking lot or the road, the place looked 100 percent unpopulated. That was good. If he couldn’t see the watchers, he assumed Scorpion couldn’t either.

And that was their insurance policy.

CHAPTER THREE

They parked the tanker truck and the flatbed truck in the huge, empty lot behind Ruby’s, and sat in the cabs while sleet hit the windshield and ran down in icy rivulets. After a few minutes, Miriam came over from the tanker truck and squeezed in next to David, who took her hands and rubbed them. All four of them crammed into the front seat now, practically on each other’s laps.

“I don’t like that guy,” she said.

“In what way?” Jacob asked.

“He was nervous as hell. Sweaty hands on the wheel, looking in the rearview mirror.”

“We’re all on edge,” Jacob said. “I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

“You should have seen him jump when I pulled out my Beretta to check the clip.”

“I’m sure that helped his nerves,” David said.

“Needed him to see that I could take care of myself,” she said. “And if he tried anything funny, he’d end up with a bullet in his head.”

Jacob gave Miriam a hard look. What had gotten into her tonight? Was she freaking out about the pregnancy again, and trying to prove it wasn’t turning her soft?

“Did you show him the back way out of here?” he asked.

“I did. Didn’t make much of a difference. He seems to be afraid of us as much as the other guys.”

“Who cares what he thinks?” David said. “We’re here to do this deal on our terms. And if he thinks we’re going to rob him, that’s his problem, not ours.”

“They’re here,” Stephen Paul said.

Three trucks pulled into the parking lot. The first two were extended cab pickup trucks, and the third was a flatbed truck not much different from their own. The vehicles lined up side by side with their lights crossed into a brightly lit space in front of them. Seconds later, a tanker truck edged in behind them, an older, filthier version of Mo’s own truck, and sat idling a few dozen yards behind.

“Three trucks and a tanker,” David said. “That’s a whole lot of fuel to burn. Someone is cheating on his ration cards.”

“That’s what black market means,” Miriam said. “Anyway, so are we.” She hesitated. “Jacob, you’re sure about this?”

“Do you think the brownouts are going to go away on their own? Neither do I. So, yes, we need those turbines.” He nodded at his brother. “Assuming David knows how to hook them up and produce power.”

“I’m getting there,” David said. “And I’ve got a stack of books and the electrical burns to prove it.”

“Let’s get this over with,” Stephen Paul grumbled. “Sooner we’re done with these gentiles, the better.”

Jacob was studying the situation cautiously but saw nothing from the other side to raise suspicion.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go. Don’t make them nervous. Pull up slowly, park next to their flatbed truck. Miriam, go back and keep Mo calm and compliant.”

Miriam trotted back to Mo’s tanker. Stephen Paul turned the key, and the engine kicked over with a growl. As he crept forward, the driver’s side door opened on one of the pickups opposite them, and a man armed with a rifle stepped out and into the cone of light in front of his truck. He wore a baseball cap pulled over his eyes and a ski jacket zipped to his neck.

Stephen Paul stopped the truck long enough for Jacob and David to pile out, and then inched forward as Jacob slammed the door behind him.

The chill, damp air hit Jacob and he buttoned his sheepskin jacket. If it wasn’t winter already here at seventy-five hundred feet on the canyon rim, it would be soon. He and David shielded their eyes as they stepped into the sleet and the bright headlights of the trucks.

“It’s me, Jacob Christianson,” he said as he approached the man with the rifle. He felt the weight of his pistol in the holster in his jacket, saw David behind his right shoulder, carrying his deer rifle.

“Your tanker is full?” the man asked.

“Not quite, but almost,” Jacob said.

“What do you mean, almost?” he said, voice tightening.

The man stepped out of the blinding headlights and showed his face for the first time. Jacob wasn’t sure what he’d expected,
maybe a younger, equally tattooed version of Mo Strafford, or some Latin American drug lord type. Like a Hollywood criminal.

Instead, he had the lean, wiry body of a younger man, even as his face showed years of sun and wind exposure. A ski jacket, a shaggy haircut, and a stubbled chin. He looked like the kind of guy who spent his winters on the slopes and his summers biking the slickrock trails of Moab and tossing back bottles of the local microbrew, even while other guys his age had long since settled down with a wife, kids, and an office job. He was Hispanic but light skinned, almost Mediterranean in appearance. One thing was for sure, he didn’t look like a man whose nickname was Scorpion. How about “Weed” or “Boner”?

Careful. Don’t underestimate him.

In six short months a supervolcano on the other side of the world had reduced the Southwest to patches of civilization surrounded by a lawless wilderness. Only a certain type could thrive in such an environment, and he wouldn’t be the type you’d want to cross.

“I’ve got a shade over eight thousand gallons,” Jacob said.

“You said nine. That was the deal.”

“And I thought I’d get it. Fell a little short. But I do have twenty thousand dollars to make up for the missing fuel. That’s twenty bucks a gallon. Twice the going rate.” He reached his hand slowly into his jacket and pulled out the wad of hundred-dollar bills to show he was sincere.

“I’ve got money,” Scorpion said. “I need fuel.”

“And I don’t have it. I’ll be lucky to get these trucks back to Blister Creek and I won’t have more diesel for three more weeks.”

More lying, but in the end, nothing would make them a bigger
target for theft than the general belief that Blister Creek could easily meet large orders for fuel.

“Either you take eight thousand and twenty grand in cash,” he continued, “or the deal is off. Sorry. Plans change. Got to take what you can get.”

Jacob kept his eye on Stephen Paul as the man came to a stop side by side with the other flatbed truck. He met the other driver, and the two men exchanged curt nods, but not handshakes. Stephen Paul tossed back the tarp on the truck’s cargo and then busied himself hooking the chain from the mounted crane on his own truck to the biggest piece of equipment in the back of the other. Jacob took that as a good sign, as was Scorpion’s failure to wave off the movement of goods between the two trucks.

“All right,” the other man said. “Get that tanker up here, let’s go.” He looked around at the empty two-story motel buildings, and the larger main building itself. “For all we know, there’s some caretaker still on site and he’s already phoned the sheriff.”

That’s more true than you know,
Jacob thought. He could almost feel the other pairs of eyes watching from opposite sides of the parking lot.

Mo pulled his full tanker next to the empty one brought in by Scorpion’s team, and here he met the other driver and they started fiddling with hoses. Meanwhile, Miriam climbed down from the other side and started walking around the perimeter, looking at the undercarriage again. Hard to say what she was looking for, but it looked suspicious and Jacob caught Scorpion watching with a frown.

Still, it looked like everything would come off without a hitch, and when Stephen Paul backed up moments later, cargo
secured, Jacob felt the tension releasing. He handed Scorpion the money. The man didn’t pull off the rubber band and count it but tucked it into an inner pocket of his ski jacket.

Stephen Paul parked the truck and hopped down. “Where’s the turbine?”

“That’s it,” Scorpion said.

“That’s
one
of them,” Stephen Paul said.

“Yep, and it’s the bigger one we promised. The little one didn’t make it. Turned out to be scrap.”

“We’re not idiots,” Stephen Paul said. “That
is
the little one. It’s stamped right on the side—one hundred KWH. And it’s a piece of junk, looks older than Bryce Canyon. Where’s the three hundred you promised?”

A deep unease spread through Jacob. “Hold on a second. What game are you playing with us?”

“What is it you said?” Scorpion said with a shrug. His hands went to his pockets. “Plans change. Got to take what you can get.”

“Hands out of your pockets,” David said. He stepped wide of Jacob and lowered his rifle.

“I wouldn’t try anything if I were you,” the man answered.

The doors opened on the extended cab pickups, and armed men climbed down. There were six in all, each man holding an assault rifle.

Jacob weighed the odds. He had a pistol, assuming he could draw in time, David had his rifle, Stephen Paul the M6 with full auto, but that was still on the seat of the truck. Miriam was retreating from the tanker drivers, having noticed the change in posture and drawn her pistol. Before she disappeared into the darkness, Jacob saw her intention to flank Scorpion’s men.

“We’re not trying anything,” he said. “We came for two hydro turbines, a new three hundred kilowatt hour and a used one hundred. You gave us the used turbine, which my friend says is junk. Might be worth twenty grand, maybe not. But I don’t want trouble, so you can take the money, and we’ll keep our fuel.”

“I don’t think so. In fact, I think we’ll take back the small one, and your truck to carry it on. Plus the fuel. You can walk out of here, if you can. Or, you can fight it out if you’d like.”

As he spoke, the six armed men spread across the lit space between the trucks, with two men coming to stand by their leader’s side. They moved with ease and a cocky stride, as if they’d pulled this sort of heist before.

“Backstabbing sonofabitch,” David muttered.

Scorpion stood confidently, hands still in pockets and no doubt curled around a weapon or two, but not acting alarmed or nervous in any way. Sure, he thought he had all the advantages. Why wouldn’t he?

“Fine,” Jacob said. “It’s all yours.” As he backed away, he lifted his hands as if in surrender.

As soon as his hands rose above his shoulders, a rifle shot cracked through the air. One of the men by Scorpion’s side collapsed. His gun fell to the ground and he grabbed at his thigh, writhing and screaming.

At the gunshot, Jacob, David, and Stephen Paul ducked behind their truck. More shots cracked down from the darkened motel buildings around them, blowing out windows of the pickup trucks and cracking against the pavement. Scorpion and his men fired back in bursts of automatic and semiautomatic fire. The plate
glass windows exploded along the side of the hotel gift shop and rang against the side of the truck.