Below them the East Fork of the Jemez became a thread, a water snake delivering the hidden waters of the mountain down to the pueblos.
The pilot, an experienced argonaut, gunned his boat, and instead of skimming over the treetops and following the highway, he rose like an eagle, casting off the earth’s gravity. As they flew over the lip of the caldera Sonny had a view of the crater, El Valle Grande, the ancient mountain’s sunken womb.
In the kivas of the Pueblos, the sipapu was a small, round hole in the earth. From such an opening, the stories told, the ancestors emerged long ago. Seen from up high the volcano’s caldera was a sipapu of the earth, a place of emergence.
“Chingao,” he whispered, looking down. The round, sunken crater of the mountain formed a Zia symbol!
Sonny focused on the lines that radiated out from the caldera, the four directions stretching toward four sacred mountains, rolling away into infinity. A cosmos conceived by the ancestors. The prehistoric Americans had been here, and in the crater’s green valley they saw an earth-womb, a place described in their legends. The Zia symbol defined the quadripartite earth. The yoni of the mountain was the center, birthplace of seething magma and boiling waters.
Suddenly the pilot pointed the chopper downward. He had climbed as far as he could go, and now he dropped in joy, round and round like a horny dragonfly during mating season.
“Look!” Augie shouted, nudging Sonny. “The Thing!”
There, about half a mile from Highway 4, which cut along the edge of the volcanic maw, sat the phallic spaceship, its nose stuck into the wet earth and winter-sere grass of the crater, its coat of shining metal reflecting the morning sunlight. The bomb, Raven’s desire.
“The Thing?”
“Yeah,” Augie shouted. “Like the movies! Fucking science fiction! Digital technology! Clones! Shit! What’s real?”
Men in white, technicians from the labs, crawled around the bomb, holding their instruments to its belly, gauging it, measuring its radiation, skittering around the Thing like fearful ants. Along the highway where the lab cars and vans and SWAT Team jeeps were parked, more technicians gathered.
“Roswell!” Augie shouted and laughed, and gave the pilot a high five. “I swear it’s Roswell all over! A guy could make a fortune out of this! You know the major networks are going to be here. So you play this up, make it a tourist attraction. A guy could make a million. Hit the talk shows … Jerry Springer, you know. Sometimes I wonder why I stay in the force.”
The pilot nodded and brought the helicopter to a fluttering landing several hundred feet from the bomb.
Augie kept jabbering as they disembarked. “Looks like that first atom bomb they exploded down at Trinity Site. Fat Boy. If they can disarm it and take it down to Jemez Springs, place it in front of the Bath House, I kid you not: there’s millions in tourism dollars! Hell, I should get into this.”
Sonny, clutching Chica, followed Augie out of the vibrating chopper. A state police captain greeted them. Behind them stood the lab’s heavily armed SWAT Team, outfitted to the hilt.
“Sonny, damn glad you came,” said the captain, whose ID tag read Stevens. “This is Mr. Sturluson, he’s the head honcho.”
Sturluson shook Sonny’s hand. “Call me Snore. Glad you could make it. Let’s get to the point. We removed a side panel. Whoever placed this thing here left a message. I think you should look at it. First, slip into these.”
They put on the protective suits and walked to the cylinder, its pointed nose stuck into the ground, its tail end sticking into the sky.
“Has fins like a fifties Cadillac, don’t it? I tell you, it’s too much,” Augie joked.
“But not a laughing matter,” Stevens said coldly.
“No it’s not,” Sturluson agreed. “It’s hot. We don’t know if it contains nuclear waste, which might be easier to deal with, or—” He paused. “The missing core.”
“Why put it here?” Augie asked.
“Hard to tell. But whoever placed it here wanted us to find it.”
“In fact,” Stevens added, “an anonymous phone call told us where to find it.”
Raven, Sonny thought.
Stevens cleared his throat. “Okay, I’ll level with you. We first thought this was Raven’s work. But it turns out he wants to work with us. Claims he’s got information on Al Qaeda, or a terrorist organization linked to Al Qaeda.”
“As I said,” Augie said with satisfaction.
“At this point in time I don’t care who he’s working for or who placed the bomb. It’s ticking, and we need to defuse it.”
“And Raven’s promised to help?” Sonny asked.
“As far as I know. But we don’t know where he is or if he can, or will, help. Either way, we can’t wait. We have to defuse this thing.”
Sonny shook his head. Of course Raven would play all sides. Hire a few misguided terrorists to plant a bomb, then turn against them. Promise the government one thing, and deliver another. Perhaps the whole thing wasn’t a Raven plot, but one more scenario by the CIA or FBI to entrap whatever terrorist cell existed in the state. Raven would play along with them.
Sonny looked at the highway and up the timbered slope of the mountain. A raven called, and the wind whipped the cry down to where they stood. He was here now. Laughing. Playing games.
“We don’t even know if the thing has explosives. It is radioactive, and it is wired, but we just don’t know—we did remove a panel.”
Sturluson pointed at the opening where a panel on the side of the bomb had been removed, exposing a jumble of wiring inside, the face of a clock, the hour hand pointing at six.
Sonny shook his head. What the hell did he know about an armed nuke? Nothing, except it was Raven’s game and that meant trickery. He walked around the bomb. It looked like the copy of the Fat Boy bomb Raven had the Ukrainian scientist build in Sandia Labs. And that had been, in the end, a dud.
The brightly shining mass of metal reflected the morning light, exuding an aura so strong Sonny could smell the fear it created in the scientists who cautiously moved around it, their instruments buzzing.
Sonny thought of the X Files TV show he and Rita liked to watch. If this whole thing was taking place in another dimension, where were Mulder and Skully when you needed them? Maybe Augie was right and life was turning into one giant science fiction show, or a parody of it. Perhaps that’s why so many yearned for a simpler time when people watched the moon and stars, measured the sun’s course, the satisfying cyclical time of the seasons, time constantly transforming and renewing itself into something good. Now time was measured by the stock market, multinational corporations’ earnings, and banks that took interest from the third world’s economies. A false time, setting its imprint on the human psyche, sure to pervert human nature beyond repair.
“Speak of the devil, here comes the damned media!”
Sonny looked up into the sky. Outlined against the blue were two brightly colored paragliders, a cameraman suspended on each chute. Circling, hanging in the empty space, cameras silently whirring as they focused on the sight below. Their images were being beamed all over the world.
“We shut the road and they do this! Arrest every goddamn sonofabitch!” Stevens shouted, and a dozen SWAT Team officers ran toward the chutes.
“It’s too late. They’re already on the air waves. It’s all a matter of time.”
“We can’t let the public know—”
Sturluson turned to Sonny. “We found a note.” He handed Sonny a plastic bag. “It was inside the panel we removed. We checked it, it’s clean, no radiation.”
Chica growled. She smelled Raven. Sonny put her down and she ran first to smell, then to pee at the foot of the Thing.
“Don’t that beat all? A one-eyed dog peeing on a nuke!”
“Beer makes her do that,” Sonny said lamely.
He opened the bag and read Raven’s message, in handwriting that Sonny realized looked very much like his own: Sonny, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Dreaming dogs don’t lie.
Sonny frowned, put the note back into the baggie, and handed it to Sturluson.
“What the hell does it mean?”
“He likes to play games.”
“But he’s promised to help,” Sturluson said. “And I need help. The experts who can defuse this won’t be here in time.” He pointed at the clock. “Ticking right toward six o’clock.”
There was little Sonny could say. He looked at the metallic skin of the bomb. Smooth as liquid mercury. Mercurial. Hermes. Messenger of the gods, except Raven’s gods weren’t the very human gods of Greek myths. His spirit ran rampant in the darkest parts of the psyche, dancing like dervishes deep in the unconscious. Each could be a god of destruction if not fished out of the broth of stagnant waters and brought into the air and light of the sun.
He touched the Zia medallion resting on his chest. Raven would kill for the symbol of the sun. Plant all sorts of tricks in the way, trickster that he fashioned himself to be, lord of skillful ravens.
Now he was ready to destroy the mountain, to rain death and destruction.
A Trojan Horse, with something dangerous lying in the belly of the Thing. But was it Raven’s plutonium pit?
“There’s one more thing,” Sturluson said. “The Pentagon has lost a communications satellite. If these events are connected—” He frowned. He was in charge and right then there was very little he could do. The experts in disarming bombs were just now boarding planes hundreds of miles away. They wouldn’t make it by six.
“If it goes off, Los Alamos goes. The entire area gets rained with the radioactive cloud, it spreads in the Jet Stream—a holocaust far beyond 9-11.”
“Damn!”
9
There’s something more than the destruction of Los Alamos on Raven’s mind, Sonny thought as he and Augie walked back to the helicopter. He could have dropped Fat Boy right in the middle of the Los Alamos Labs, or in downtown Alburquerque. That would create immediate panic. Placing it on top of the mountain was a calculated move. Raven was making deals with the government. What kind of deals? And was Raven protected? It had been revealed that he once worked as some kind of courier for Los Alamos Labs.
Could it be that Raven was now seeking adulation from the very society he wanted to destroy? The terrorists’ recent war wasn’t new; it was as old as mankind. Raven the terrorist, or one of his tortured kind, had existed in every civilization on earth since the beginning of time. Had he now moved beyond running drug shipments into the country, beyond the eco-terrorism he had plotted last summer. Was he now masterminding Al Qaeda cells and other terrorist cults that prayed to the gods of intentional ruin?
The darkness of Raven’s troubled soul only desired to return to the nothingness of the cosmic sea. The Zero before all zeros. The terrorist conspiracy had spread and Raven was using it to accomplish his goal. Chaos. Eternal strife. The bending of the light of the sun and the universal energy unto the final destruction. Apocalypse. Radioactive fires burning flesh and bone, cadavers with blistered skin walking the wasteland. A moaning of the last humans could be heard in the shrill winds that swept across the desolation.
Sonny shivered. Damn, a spring day in the Jemez, people going about their business, a time to fish the pools for trout that slept there all winter, the acequias gurgling with water that soon would rush through the canals into the fields, awakening the buds in dormant apple trees, apricot blossoms filling the air with the aroma of lust. Florella, the virgin of spring, was ready to bust the buds open.
Yes, it was the season of healthy lust, Eve enticing Adam with an apricot, or a pear, or a Mexican mango, or an apple grown in the jemez valley, sweet fruits of paradise bursting with mouth-watering juices.
But Adam wasn’t biting her apple. Que pasa?
Está chingado, Sonny cursed, like us.
Raven’s every move was calculated to suck Sonny into the maelstrom, and in the process win the Zia medallion. Now he had called Sonny to the mountain, but the battle wasn’t really there. As always, it had to be in the dream world where Raven lived, an unconscious realm laden with ancient images.
Had Raven chosen Jemez Springs because Sonny and Rita had a house by the river? They could hear the river song on summer nights, watch the galaxies move across the sky, the seasons of the moon, make love to the movement of stars and planets, make love to the music of the spheres.
That life was simple, as life should be simple, but not for Raven’s kind. Terrorists thrived on chaos, and somehow the doomsday message, “The world is ending! The world is ending!” resonated with those marginalized by greedy men whose only alchemical formula served to turn every material object into money. It wasn’t just the Al Qaeda terrorists who promised paradise. The banks and transnational corporations were all promising everyone a slice of ill-gotten pie. Pie baked from the labors of the poor, the undocumented, Latinos seeking work in cold, cold northern climes.
Raven traveled in the heart. He was always near, tracking in Sonny’s dream. He was one of the subterranean images of the dream, a character in that dark soup. Every heart carried love, but every heart could also seethe with primal lust and violence; there was no denying that. In the deoxyribonucleic acid of every cell there also slept a third but invisible coiled strand. Call it chaos. Those frightening, unexplainable images that arose even in the most peaceful sleep made the dreamer wonder what was real and what was illusion, what was heaven and what was hell.
But why blow up the Jemez Mountains?
The water, the old man said. The hidden waters. Destroy the life-giving waters, and you destroy the dream of the Zia Stone. Create a new, unnatural volcano and fear returns to rule.
You here?
Hey, I wouldn’t miss seeing Raven’s newest act.
What do you think?
If it weren’t serious it would make me laugh. He’s really gone bananas. Se le fueron las cabras.
Is there time?
Sí, there’s time. If you can find Raven. He’s going to give it up, but not till he has his fun.
The chopper rose like, a mad rufous hummingbird, feisty and full of chatter. Turbulence lingered on the mountaintop, the dying breath of a leprous wind that scattered a few impoverished clouds over the caldera. Clouds stringy as a bullsnake whip, clouds to make a philosopher wonder if it was the wind whipping the clouds or the clouds whipping the wind.
Crack the whip, Sonny thought, as a chain of the boys and girls, fifth graders at Adobe Acres, joined hands in the school yard at recess and the lead boy, always Chango, monkey boy who lived over at Kinney Brick and could whip even eighth graders, began to run and pull the line, like a rattlesnake unwinding, faster and faster until the line cracked and the smallest squirt at the end of the line, the rattler, was catapulted into the air, landing in the torito-goatheadstrewn dirt. Blood and guts.
The morning had turned bitter. A spring wind howled after the night’s scant rain. The serpent head of the fleeing clouds hovered over the caldera, the vagina of the mountain, casting its evil eye, el mal ojo, over the mountain. The cloud’s dark face pregnant with anger, eyes and mouth spewing acid, spitting from venomous lips not the rain that blesses but the pollution of the world that swept up into the sky and came down as poison. A cloud with a hateful look that did not come from the heart of heaven but came from the demon world, the very world made by man, its luminous hair flaring around its sickly face.
It shouldn’t be like this. The Cloud People come with gentle rain that enters the dry earth like a man might wet the welcoming thighs of his beloved, a soft caressing so sure and full of love that even the earth groans in peaceful response, as the woman moans to take the gift of seed.
Birthing was for spring. But today the world was balanced on a fulcrum, teetering on the edge of its own destruction, and even the clouds protested the wind’s fury, a Poseidon of the desert.
Sonny remembered summer clouds over the mountain, huge billowing white buffalo clouds that rose and rose, until in a stampede the thunde
r shower let loose its bolts of lightning, a rumbling thunder that rolled across the valley like Rip Van Winkle’s bowling balls, and sheets of blue rain that splattered the earth and ran wild in rivulets. The cumulus of summer, welcomed by the people of the mountain and the people of the Jemez Valley.
Love during a thunderstorm was tumultuous like that, with sperm and ovum blending into the sweet aroma that rose from the wet earth, the heavenly joy of Rita’s face, those moments of climax in which her face radiated with love as she received his thrust, like swollen sunrays breaking through clouds after the blessed rain.
Someday the white buffalo clouds would return and break the drought on the land of Egypt. Someday the white buffalo would return to the plains, and the dancing would begin anew. The sun would once again be merciful.
The chopper rose and buzzed over a line of sickly pine trees, trees hurting from the drought and the parasites sucking at their green blood.
No good, Sonny thought. Ominous. No hard rains to break the drought that had consumed the state for the past seven years. Need Moses. Need someone to strike dead the pharaoh of drought. These summers past when little rain fell the cicadas had munched the valley pastures into stubble, left the apple trees bare, run rampant through corn and calabacitas, laying waste to the land of the ancestors.
There was hope. Somewhere on the mountain’s flanks, somewhere in a dark canyon that led into the womb of the great lady, on a scarred volcanic boulder was etched the ancient symbol of life, the Zia Stone with its secret message, the meaning of life as it had been given to the old people, a hieroglyph so potent that sometimes at night, deep in dream, Sonny could feel its throbbing heart.
Raven thinks I found the Zia Stone.
The Zia Stone and the medallion are connected, the old man said. They complement each other.
So why here?
I think the cops wanted you out of the way. They don’t want you to meet with the Indians in Algodones. People know you, Sonny. You could really help the cause. Dominic wants to break the back of that group.