“Same thing I found yesterday.”
“It’s a start.”
“A restart. We’ve lost a full day.” Walter closed his chart and swiveled to face me. “As to the canyons, Hector’s offered an escort.”
We’d lost more than a day. We’d lost our freedom in the field. I curled my hands, where the cut palm stung. I focused on Walter’s hands, which rested on his thighs. Old hands, marked by the years and the sun and the rocks in the field. Blunt-fingered corded hands, still strong. Hap should draw those hands. There was a thin white scar on his right pointer, courtesy of his pocket knife. I had my own knife scar — right thumb, from peeling crystals of mica. And now of course I had a fresh palm wound, although I couldn’t blame that on normal wear and tear. I regarded our four hands. Not a Glock callus in sight. We were sitting ducks. I said, “Good idea.”
We worked another half-hour and then there came a knock at the door.
“Will you get that?” Walter said, nose in his soils. “It may be Pria.”
“Who’s Pria?”
“Our girl. She appears to spend her free time around here.”
I rose. “You know her name.”
“Shouldn’t I?”
There was another knock — pounding this time — and I thought, not only do we require babysitting, we’re becoming babysitters, and I reached the door and opened it before she could pound again. But it wasn’t Pria, it was Hap.
He said, “We got mail.”
We left the Inn by convoy.
Walter and I rode with Soliano and Hap and Ballinger in a green Jeep Soliano had appropriated from the Park Service. RERT vans tailed us.
We took highway 190 around the back of the Inn and up the stem of the fan into the mountains. The road followed a wide gravelly wash, which climbed gently between two parallel ranges. To our left continued the abrupt face of the Funerals. To our right began the Black Mountains, which ran southward between the saltpan and the Funerals. We were wedged between two mountain faces as different as Walter’s and — it came to me — Pria’s. The cavernous Funerals were folded in sunburnt browns and somber grays and the gentle Blacks were furred in pastel mudstones. We passed a beard of white issuing from the fault zone along the base of the Funerals. Travertine deposits, I hazarded. Old dry springs.
Indeed, we were traveling up a long drainage ditch. I saw how the waters that drained from the Funerals and Blacks would collect in the gravelly wash, which would channel those waters with their sediment load down to spill onto the fan. I saw how the fan was still being built.
I’d keep that flood channel in mind, what with these hurricane-spawned storms. I had checked the weather report and learned that the hurricane off Baja California, according to Monday’s forecast, would be throwing storms our way all week. I’d keep in mind the Park Service’s doppler radar scan, which provided a detailed flood risk index.
I peered at the sky. Broken clouds.
“Dolomite up there,” Walter said, peering at the Funerals.
I saw. Dolomite in fender layer four. How coy of Jardine if he’d stashed his radioactive booty in the Funerals.
Our destination, however, was in the Black Mountains. We turned off 190 onto the graded road that cut into Twenty-Mule-Team Canyon. The jumbled badlands were naked of any shrub, their eroded contours shaded in mustard and cream and purple and pink. Black-mouthed burrows pockmarked the hills.
Walter checked his map against the GPS coordinates in Jardine’s email.
You are cordially invited, Jardine had written. And then he gave the time and place. And then he set the hook: A package awaits you inside the borax mine.
And we bit. We couldn’t pass up the chance to recover at least some of the stolen radwaste. Of course, we had to consider that it might be a trap, which was why we planned to proceed with all due care. Or, maybe, nothing awaited us in the mine, and this was a hoax — Jardine running us around the desert, deflecting us from our job of following the evidence.
The road climbed and curved and I stopped admiring the geology and started worrying about the mine we’d been invited to. The mudstone was now shot with snowy veins of borate ore. I knew my mining geology — anyone who worked with Walter had to know her mining geology. An ancient lake once filled this area, collecting alluvia from the surrounding mountains, some of whose rocks contained boron. And then the lake dried up and the borates were precipitated out, and then people came along to mine it, and then Roy Jardine came along to defile it.
We rounded the bend and Walter said, “Here.”
The convoy stopped. We piled out and flinched, hammered by the heat.
There was a small ridge above us and footprints led up the hillside. We paused to examine them. They were fresh, made after this morning’s thundershower. We’d seen their like before, at the crash site: dimple-soled rubber prints, bootie prints. Roy Jardine’s prints. Very smart, Roy. So you really were here. I shivered.
Scotty took the lead. In his board shorts and Hawaiian shirt he looked like the surfer dude he’d been. But he was RERT chief now with instruments strapped over each shoulder. We went single-file along the spine of the ridge, a beaten path in the crumbly soil. If I were making a movie starring the badlands of Mars, I’d film it here. Where clouds shadowed it, the soil looked bruised, but it nonetheless threw up waves of heat. I took small breaths, hoping to cool the air before it seared my lungs. Mars-breathing.
Ahead, the ridge dead-ended in the flank of a hill. Scotty metered the area then gave us the thumbs-up.
We followed the bootie prints to the adit that cored into the hillside. The adit was about six feet high and wide enough for a couple of fat mules. Nothing fancy, no timbers, no rails, just a gate barring entrance and a warning sign: DANGER: Loose rock. Decaying explosives. Bad air. Rattlesnakes.
To say nothing of whatever Jardine had left for us in there.
Hap read the sign. “Whew, no bats.”
Scotty turned to Soliano. “Hey, what about the bats?” Scotty had found and collected the bat on the saltpan and handed off both carcasses to a lab in Vegas that could do a radioanalysis necropsy, fast.
Soliano squinted, as if fighting a vision of sunlit teeth. “ARS.”
We digested that. Nobody voiced the thought that two bats, somewhere within their range, had encountered a lethal source of high-rad resins. Nobody said aloud, maybe somewhere is here.
Soliano had a Park Service key but he didn’t need it — the gate nudged open.
Walter said, “Look at those.”
Tire tracks, faint but unmistakable, inside the adit. I looked back along the ridge but if there had been tracks incised there, rain or wind had obliterated them. Still, whatever rolled into this tunnel must have come up that path. Narrow, but doable — fit for a Mars-roving telehandler.
No way to know when the telly was here but I figured I knew the why. To transport a cask. Any thought that our summons was a hoax wilted in the hot adit mouth.
“Okey-doke,” Scotty said, “let’s get to it.”
Soliano started. “But you are not yet suited.”
“Checking for gas, first, Hector. Carbon monoxide, dioxide. Collects in old mines near the floor. We walk around much and we’ll stir it up.”
I felt monumentally relieved that Scotty knew this. That he was prepared for whatever mother nature, along with Roy Jardine, had in store for us.