“And the same was true for three of the four other attempts to interview him. There was a brief FBI interview with the Don—via satellite hookup—two years ago, but the special agents asked poor questions. Yours will be the first true interview with the man… the man who was one of the last to be interviewed on camera by Keigo Nakamura and who might have had serious motives for not wanting that interview seen by anyone else.”
“So you think that Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev is the prime suspect?” asked Nick, trying and failing to turn his head far enough to look directly at Sato.
“He is the most important person in the investigation yet to be interviewed by a competent investigator, Bottom-san.”
Nick almost laughed again. He felt like anything and everything but a “competent investigator” at that moment.
Sato touched buttons and a high whine seemed to be buzzing in Nick’s skull.
“What’s that? The turbines?”
“No, the large gyroscopes,” said Sato. “Coming up to speed.”
“What the hell do we need gyroscopes for?”
“They help right the vehicle, along with hydraulic jacks, should the Land Cruiser be knocked off its wheels.”
This time, Nick did laugh.
“There is something funny, Bottom-san?”
“Yeah, there’s something funny. A minute ago, when Joe went up through the roof, I thought I was in a World War Two B-seventeen movie—you know, Twelve O’Clock High or something. Now I realize I’m caught in the middle of Mad Max or Road Warrior.”
“These are also American movies about World War Two?” asked Sato as he pushed more buttons. The huge turbos fired up and added to the din in Nick’s aching skull. Joe’s turret-gun contraption whirred behind him.
“No,” said Nick, reminding himself not to shout into the microphone. “They were twentieth-century movies—Australian, I think—about a shitty future where everything had gone to hell and men killed men in their weird cars on the lawless highway.”
“Ahhh,” grunted Sato. “Skiffy.”
“What?”
“American skiffy.”
“What’s that?” asked Nick as Sato checked on comm with the Land Cruiser carrying Willy, Toby, and Bill. “Skiffy? What is that?”
“You know,” said Sato, shifting the heavy vehicle into gear. Nick could hear the Oshkosh M-ATV’s heavy transmission grinding beneath him. “Skiffy.”
“Spell it,” said Nick.
“S-c-i-hyphen-f-i,” said Sato, taking the lead in front of the second Land Cruiser and guiding them past a tank and toward the gap a military crane had opened for them in the wall of concrete barriers across the highway. “Skiffy.”
Nick laughed harder than before.
“You’re absolutely right, Hideki-san,” he said at last, wondering how he was going to wipe away the snot under his oxygen mask. “This whole thing is skiffy and getting skiffier by the moment.”
They rolled out of Colorado and the United States and downhill into New Mexico.
3.02
Las Vegas, Nevada, and Beyond—Wednesday, Sept. 22
FROM PROFESSOR EMERITUS GEORGE LEONARD FOX’S PRIVATE JOURNAL
Five days of travel. Five days. These last five days seem more eventful to me, more lived, than my last five years. And when I say “lived,” I mean more filled with life defined in the rich, overflowing-with-consciously-realized-experience mode exemplified by only a few of my favorite literary characters such as, say, Alys, the Wife of Bath. So perhaps I’ve lived more in the last five days than I have in my last fifteen years. Or in my last fifty years.
Or perhaps I’ve never lived this fully before.
One reason I can write this with such cautious joy is that so far no one in our party has been harmed. By “party” I’m not sure if I’m talking about just Val and me, or Val and me and our drivers Julio and Perdita Romano, or Val, me, Julio, Perdita, and the hundreds of others in this truck convoy. In my joy and terror at being alive this week, I have become large. I contain multitudes.
It’s hard to believe that only two nights ago I was witnessing with my own aged eyes the spectacle that is Las Vegas—Las Vegas and all the joyfully riotous caravan encampments circled and sprawled across the torchlit desert beyond the wall that protects Las Vegas, Nevada, from the violent twenty-first-century cemetery that surrounds this last holdout of a twentieth-century city (but which so far does not intrude upon and which so far has not prevailed over Las Vegas’s own bright, improbable, tenuous, and surreal reality).
The high, transparent wall with its complement of beacons, lasers, banners, and warning lights began just to the south of where the 215 bypass used to come into Interstate 15. The wall continued beyond 215 up the west side of the city and out almost to Henderson to the east. McCarran Airport was deep inside the walled and protected part of the city, of course, as were all the great casinos.
From our encampment on a low rise southwest of the city, we were able to see the tower of the Stratosphere far to the north (with its roller coaster and other rides at the top still running) all the way to the Luxor near the south wall, the glass pyramid’s laser spotlight visibly stabbing into space during the day as well as night. But it was at night that Las Vegas was in its true element: the lights and searchlights and lasers of what had been the MGM Grand and the Mandalay Bay and the Excalibur and Paris and New York–New York. Some came complete with their somehow touching miniatures, the Statue of Liberty and the scaled-down Eiffel Tower. We could also see the curve of the Bellagio and not-quite-topless towers of Bally’s, Harrah’s, the Imperial Palace, Treasure Island, the Google Grand, and the Mirage towering over the low, midcentury clusters of Caesars Palace and the downtown Sahara, Riviera, and the old Circus Circus.
Just east of the airport were the lighted white domes of the Taj Mahal—120 percent scale of the original—but only the lower domes there were casinos and hotels; the main dome was the India-built reactor that cooled and lighted Las Vegas now that Hoover Dam was only a memory.
Since almost all of the small towns that once defied Nevada’s heat and dryness are abandoned now—the Mesquites and Tonopahs and Elys and Elkos and Battle Mountains and Pahrumps and Searchlights, everything up to the size of Reno and Carson City that had their own reactors but still had lost more than 80 percent of their populations—I could only imagine how brilliant Las Vegas must look from space when the terminator of night has been drawn across this part of the American West.
Beside the flickering, blazing lights inside the walled city itself—the very translucent walls, inhabited as they are now by hotel rooms and casinos of their own, glowing golden at night—there were myriad more lights encamped out on the desert: huge trucks by the thousands, their rig lights flashing, and in their lighted circles the giant campfires with wood hauled a thousand miles and more for just that purpose.
It struck me three nights ago while watching the celebrations outside the city walls of Las Vegas—the rodeos and fairs, the traveling circuses with their lighted Ferris wheels and roller coasters and rocket whips, the hundreds of taverns, pubs, and bars driven in or opened under a tent, the motorcycle and motocross races roaring past canvas whorehouses in dusty tent cities that were constantly tearing themselves down and rebuilding, an eternal Midway set without the walls of a city that is in itself a Midway for the millions of millionaires that somehow still inhabit the bankrupt Earth (my grandson Val tells me the names of the machines, the millionaires’ red-and-green-blinking, landing-light-blazing Learjets and Gulfstreams and Hawker Siddeleys and Falcons and Cessna Citation Excels and Challengers and supersonic Sukhoi Putin-Sokolis landing every few seconds at McCarran)—that Las Vegas, both inside the wall and out, was America’s single greatest exception to our new No Clusterfuck Rule of don’t-gather-in-crowds.
For Julio and Perdita Romano and the thousands of other truckers and their passengers celebrating out there on the cracked hardpan beyond the glowing Vegas walls, there was no fear of suicide bombers in their midst. T
he truckers—some of them Canadians southbound to Old Mexico, others Mexicans from south of the old border hauling their loads northbound to Canada, many of them American drivers headed north, south, east, west, or a combination of these—had come too far and worked too hard to get here to this day or two of rest and fun, the twenty-first century’s highway equivalent of America’s early-nineteenth-century Rendezvous for free trappers and Indians and the buyers of their beaver pelts, to ruin it with suicide bombings and political murders.
Such insanity was reserved for the rest of the world.
THE 417 PETERBILT SLEEPER that Julio and Perdita own and operate is an incredible machine. The front of the cab with its two massive, upholstered UltraRide seats with the bank of controls facing the driver is their space. Val and I are allowed to ride on two comfortable jump seats behind and a little higher than the UltraRide seats. Behind our jump seats is a wide and comfortable bed for the Romanos—always perfectly made in the daytime and rarely used by both of them since one is usually driving—and above and behind that, separated by an accordion door, is a smaller bunk space up under the transparent air dam.
When Val and I are tucked in there and chatting in privacy before falling asleep—both Julio and Perdita tend to drive together far into the night before one or the other crawls into the bunk below—we can look up at a sky of undimmed stars. If we sit up in our comfortable cot-bed, we can look down and forward over the roof and hood of the Peterbilt at the highway rushing at us through the night.
For the first two days after our escape, Val said almost nothing, but now he is talking, making eye contact, and otherwise coming alive again. To be honest, this new Val—however shaken he has been by recent events that he’s still not willing to talk about in detail—is more like the interesting and intelligent boy who came to live with me more than five years ago. I had grown weary of the newer, sullen, uncommunicative teenager who seemed always on the brink of some inner violence.
Our last night in Los Angeles was a nightmare.
I was on the verge of either going out to search for Val or calling the police or his father—not sure whether to report him as missing or turn him in as a possible criminal—when Val rushed in and smashed my phone and we both watched the faces of his dead flashgang friends on the TV. There was no doubt that Val himself was in some sort of shock—he was paler than paper—but rather than it being a debilitating shock of the sort that would have made me or most people I know dysfunctional, this shock seemed to have turned the sixteen-year-old into a cold, robotic, but hugely efficient version of his father.
We did not have to hide in the railyards. Julio and Perdita Romano and their truck were already there with dozens of others and when I showed the Romanos the written letter of transit from Don Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa they allowed us to hide in the sleeping cab of their Peterbilt as police helicopters circled overhead and as Los Angeles burned behind us.
It was only the next day that I realized how profoundly lucky Val and I had been. The Romanos had already been paid. The little money I had left I was carrying in cash in my bag. Had the Romanos and other truckers not been honorable people, they could have left us behind that terrible Friday night or killed us on their way out of town, dumped our bodies, and no one in the world would have been the wiser.
As it was, because of the attempted assassination of Advisor Omura and the opening of the battle between reconquista forces and the city, there were highway patrol roadblocks before the 15 began its long climb toward Victorville. Julio Romano risked everything they had—not only their expensive truck but their very freedom—by taking Val and me and our luggage to the side of their Peterbilt and showing each of us where to hide in secret compartments set into the fuel tanks on opposite sides of the truck.
Even there, a touch of a switch might have released the liquefied natural gas which the trucks used as fuel into the hiding spaces and we would have been one less thing for the Romanos to worry about. Just something frozen and dead to dump in the desert. No threat to them and no loss of prepaid revenue.
But they were honorable people. After having the convoy papers provided by Emilio inspected and being passed through the highway patrol roadblocks, Julio and Perdita released us from the tiny spaces in the fuel tanks and led us back to the high seats in the Peterbilt cab and we rolled on with the convoy toward Barstow and the desert.
When either Julio or Perdita crawled into the rest area to watch their satellite TV, they allowed Val and me to watch with them. What we saw there was Los Angeles burning behind us.
The fighting was more terrible than either side—the state of California or the Nuevo Mexico reconquista cartels with their armies and gangs—could possibly have predicted. These were no mere riots. The police were not a factor and concentrated on staying out of the line of fire. Governor Lohan promised more National Guard troops to reinforce those being overrun throughout the city, but few commentators thought that this would do much good. When the governor threatened to petition the president to send in federal troops, Julio just laughed. This had been an all but empty threat for years; our federal troops were fighting in China and elsewhere for foreign masters.
But while the city and state forces had seriously underestimated the power of the reconquista forces—they seemed totally surprised by the amount of armor and artillery brought north from Old Mexico (some of which I’d seen parked under camouflage nets in the huge cemetery across from Emilio’s compound)—at the same time, Emilio’s and his spanic allies’ forces were obviously being surprised by blacks rising up in South Central, by Asians fighting in the western suburbs, by the mercenaries hired by the wealthy in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, the Mulholland highlands, and elsewhere, and by a score of other fighting cadres aligned with neither the state of California nor the forces of Nuevo Mexico. Because of this, the simple reconquista-versus–California National Guard battle over the future of Los Angeles almost immediately turned into a twenty-sided brawl. Los Angeles was becoming a purely Hobbesian state… every man pitted against every other man.
When I mentioned this to Julio and Perdita, they understood and agreed immediately. They’d both read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. So much for my lifelong assumptions about truck drivers and their levels of education.
And speaking of education, Val is receiving an interesting one on this truckers’ convoy.
After his first night and day of being almost catatonic—and I’ll write more about that later—I saw Val begin to pay serious attention to his surroundings and the people in them.
During our two nights camped with scores of other eighteen-wheelers’ convoys in the desert outside the walled-off but still beckoning lights of Las Vegas, I noticed Val’s avid—almost hungry—interest in what the men and women around the campfires had to say. Poor Val… by law and by Department of Education fiat, he’s had to celebrate “diversity” (for diversity’s sake alone) almost every hour in school since his first day in kindergarten in Denver almost a dozen years ago. But he’d never really experienced diversity until this convoy. Val has grown up in two cities, Denver and Los Angeles, where neighborhoods are racial, ethnic, linguistic, and (more and more) religious fiefdoms, each sparring and warring for a larger share of some theoretical cake in an endless zero-sum game of politics, gangs, and outright warfare.
But during these five days and nights he’s seen and listened to “Gauge” Devereaux, a black man from the South who says openly that the return to the epithet “nigger” is a statement of failure by his race and the nation at large. Devereaux has been driving his big rig for thirty-eight years and has no plans to stop now just because the cities he delivers to have become separated by wider and wider tracts of chaos.
Val’s listened to the fireside stories of Henry Big Horse Begay, a Navajo who—with his wife, Laurette—has been driving his rig for twenty-six years and who defies any bureaucrat or army or roadside bandit to stop him. Henry laughs openly—his one missing top tooth making the others seem all the whiter—a
t the irony that the white men who put his people on reservations are having their Manifest Destiny rolled back like a cheap carpet, but I’m convinced that there is absolutely no malice in the man. He’s simply a student of history.
—It happens to every race and group and nation, Henry Big Horse Begay says, still laughing. The days of greatness roll in like some great, undeserved tide, are smugly celebrated by the lucky peoples—even as mine once did—as if they had earned it, which they had not, and then the tide ebbs and the nations and tribes and peoples find themselves standing there dumb and dumbfounded on the dry and garbage-strewn beach.
Strange to hear an ocean metaphor from a man who grew up in the deserts of Arizona.
Val listens to others like Julio and Perdita, who grew up in the teeming eastern cities but who had found happiness only on the open highways—or what is left of them—and to spanics such as the Valdezes, who were born in Mexico but who have driven American Interstates since the 1980s and who refuse allegiance to any clan or gang or nation that defines itself at the expense of outsiders. And then there are the Ellises, Jan and Bob and their three kids—the children being “cab schooled,” as Jan likes to say. They’re from the South, they’re evangelicals, but they’re also witty, clever, soft-spoken, open-minded (they say they consider proselytizing an intrusion on others and don’t flaunt their faith), and the three kids—according to Val, who spent a long afternoon with them—know more geography, history, astronomy, literature, and basic science than any of Val’s fellow high school juniors.
I sensed that Val was most interested in Cooper Jakes (called Old Jakes Brakes by the other truckers for some impenetrable reason)—an ancient philosopher more ancient and wise than I, easily in his 80s if not 90s, but also as thin, tough, resilient, and seemingly immortal as gristle. Cooper Jakes’s silhouette makes up in white beard what he lacks in body fat, and, in the tradition of all great prophets, his prodigious eyebrows are jet black. Those brows can, in an instant, become as cocked and intimidating as two aimed pistol muzzles. When he is angry, Cooper Jakes reminds me of Ahab.