Deadly Waters (6 page)
Authors: Theodore Judson
07/28/06 10:10 CDT
The address on the order form intrigued Ben Lander more than the order itself. Ben a part-time clerk at the Radio Shack in Hinkley, Ohio, showed the typed order form to Shari, a girl working with him in the store’s stock room that morning.
“Twenty-three CPUs without accessories and twenty-three radio controlled cars,” he read to her.
“So?” she asked as she searched through the stacks of video games for the copy of
Death
Head
a costumer out front had requested.
“Look,” said Ben, trying to show her the form. “This guy lives in Montecual, Venezuela. Like, where’s that?”
“In South America,” said Shari.
Young Ben had thought he liked Shari, until she began taking pleasure in making him look foolish. She had a slight case of facial acne, as he did, nonetheless he thought she was prettier than Ashley, his regular girlfriend. Poor Ashley worked the evening shift at Chick-fil-A, and using the deep fryer had ruined her complexion.
“I meant, like, where in Venezuela is that?” he said.
“Oh, darn it,” said Shari. “I don’t have any Venezuela maps in my purse today. Imagine that.”
Ben grumbled something about college girls and went into Mr. Hendrix’s office and opened a search engine on the computer. Montecual, he discovered, was in the south of Venezuela, far from the populated regions of that nation, on a branch of something called the Aracua River.
“What the heck does he want with radio controlled toy cars way out there in the Amazon jungle?”
He reread the name on the order form: Charles Carello. Ben punched the name and address into the Radio Shack data base and found the same Charles Carello had purchased twenty-three video monitors from the store in Modesto, California, and twenty-three embedded chips made for use in digital cameras, from the Hollywood,
Florida, branch.
What’s he using this stuff for? Ben thought.
He took a print-out of Mr. Carello’s strange purchases back to the stock room to show to Shari, confirming her suspicion that he was trying to impress her, or at least trying to get her attention.
“Why don’t you do your work?” she said. “I already have a boyfriend,” she added, with a vicious twist of her mouth.
“Well, excuse me for living!” said Ben.
He tore up his copy of Charles Carello’s purchases and resolved not to think of the subject again. He wished to heaven Shari had not caught him looking at her legs earlier that day, for now that she knew what was on his mind she was never going to let him forget it.
07/28/06 11:02 Atlantic Standard Time
At about the same time the clerk in faraway Ohio was wondering what this Charles Corello wanted with the peculiar equipment he was ordering, Ed Harris, the engineer Mondragon had brought to Taylor’s home and who sometimes used the alias Charles Corello, was welding together two halves of a large metal cigar-shaped casing inside a
roomy compound south of Montecual, Venezuela. Kenneth Greenley, an old friend of Ed’s late father and a former Army aviator who had grown too old to fly for either commercial or military services, polished the welded seam shiny and flat after Eddie pulled back the glowing electric rod.
“The surface is not going to be particularly smooth,” Kenneth commented over the sharp hum of his grinder. “Will that throw it off track?”
“In instances when the torpedo has to travel a great distance,” said Ed, “yes. These will be going six hundred meters or so, probably less."
Abe Wilson, a machinist from Eddie’s father’s bankrupt aerospace company, came across the concrete floor of the metal building to show the other two men the propeller blades he had made in a clay mold and finished on a grinder.
“I’ve increased the rotor’s sweep by a quarter inch like you wanted,” he told Ed and tossed the metal pieces from gloved hand to gloved hand. “Hot.”
“This afternoon you and Kenneth are going to put another set of stabilizer fins on this baby while I figure out what needs to be done with this damned guidance system,” said Ed.
“Cheap Japanese workmanship,” said Abe of the guidance chip that had not been responding properly all week.
“Is this Colonel Method going to be much help to us?” asked Greenley.
“I’ve told you,” said Eddie, “right now he’s working with the shipments. Anyway, Mondragon says he’s more of a doer than a builder, whatever that means.”
“He’s not some gun nut, is he?” asked Abe. “We really don’t need a crazy on this job.”
“No, he’s as sane as any man in his line of work,” said Ed. “We’ve been allotted the time to do this ourselves. Twenty-one of the torpedoes are operational, and we have two months for the last two.”
“Till your Mr. Mondragon cuts it down to two days,” interjected Kenneth.
For twenty-four long months the three of them had battled jungle heat and the slow pace at which parts had arrived from North America while they cooked the plastique and built the torpedo shields and electronic motors from naval scrap and the twenty-three guidance systems from odds and ends of computers. The finished products of their labors were piled in racks along the metal building’s west wall, looking like giant sausages laid out length-wise in a butcher’s display case.
“We’ll do whatever he asks,” said Ed of Mondragon.
As for Erin himself, who also went by the alias Charles Corello, he was that day in San Francisco, inside a rented office and sending an e-mail to Ed Harris, informing him that another shipment, this one from Ohio, would shortly be arriving at the Venezuelan station. Needless to say, Mondragon had paid for this transaction with a money order.
“Who knows what the real Charles Corello’s credit is like?” Mondragon typed on the computer keyboard.
07/28/06 14:23 PDT
As for the real Charles Corello, he was on that Friday working as a counselor at the Second Chances halfway house in Fresno, California. After a hectic morning he had met his third client of the afternoon, Milton Francis, a former gang member recently released from prison after doing five years on a weapons charge.
“How’s Milt today?” Charles asked, entering the sparsely furnished counseling room and tossing Milton’s file on the table.
“Don’t you fucking talk to me like you know me!” Milton snarled at him. “I don’t know you. I don’t know any fucker in a tie.”
Charles fingered the stubby ends of his blue denim tie. That morning he had regretted that it, and his blue cotton shirt, were the best clothes he had, and never would he have guessed that anyone would have taken his humble wardrobe as a sign of superior status.
“I come from where you do,” said Charles. “Six years ago I was sitting where you are now.”
“So you did time,” Milton mocked him. “Everybody in this fucking place did time. Couldn’t you find any honest counselors? I got to talk to some fucking ex-con all the time?”
“You have a past,” said the resolute Charles, sticking to the script the counselors were instructed to use, “that does not mean you will not have a future. You have a point, too, about ex-cons; true, we’re mostly ex-cons ourselves here at Second Chances. No one cares about you like us, the ones that have been through the same system. And I’ll be talking to your parole officer, when you are assigned one. Things will run smoother for you if you cut out the swearing and listen to what I have to say.”
He sat at the table and glanced over Milton’s record another time.
“How do I know you’ve been there?” asked a less hostile Milton. “You could be lying. If you’re a home boy, why are you calling yourself ‘Charles?’” he said, clicking a fingernail against Corello’s name tag. “Shouldn’t you be a ‘Carlos’ or something?”
“My real name is Carlos,” he told Milton. “Or it used to be. You will find, Milton, it is better to play by the man’s rules in some cases. Some of these yahoos think I’m Italian. Look,” he said and pulled down his collar, revealing a long, angry scar. “I got that in a knife fight in ‘96. I lost two quarts of blood and was on an IV for eight days straight.”
“Eww,” said Milton in approval.
“My nose has been broken three times, first when I was seven,” said Charles and showed Milton how loose the cartilage was. “I also have this.” He pulled back his shirt sleeve and showed Milton a yellow butterfly tattooed on his wrist.
“I know that!” declared Milton in recognition. “Let’s see--east side LA?”
“Yes,” said Charles.
“Los Locos Boys?” guessed Milton.
“They were further south,” said Charles. “Los Hermanos, the brothers. What that had to do with butterflies, I forget.”
“It helped in prison, huh?” asked Milton.
“Indeed,” said Charles pulling down his sleeve. “I remember this one dude, an Indian guy, a Navaho, I think; can’t think of his name, he got the same tattoo for protection.”
“A gangsta wanna be,” said Milt. “We had those in South Central, too.”
“No, this guy was different,” recalled Charles. “He was the only Indian in Solano State I knew of. He needed the protection bad. He was lucky; as a Native American he could ask to be transferred to a federal facility. They sent him to some place called Boron. Could we get started, Milt? I’ve got five more clients today. Now, have you had a chance to look at the Job Corps brochure?”
11/12/06 15:38 Mountain Standard Time
The autumn had come and the calendar was moving quickly toward the holiday season when Mondragon proposed to Taylor it would be a good time to go fishing on the Colorado.
“It’s too late in the year,” was Taylor’s reaction when Mondragon asked him after the final rehearsal of
The
Seagull
. “Snow will be out there by this time in the fall.”
“In the mountains,” conceded Mondragon. “Not where we’re going. The Grand Valley stays warm in winter. Ed Harris--you remember Ed? Tall boy, well not a boy, about twenty-nine, I think--he and I will be around your place at six on the morning after the performance. We’ll have a lovely daylong drive out across the Great Basin, slip across Nevada to I-70 in Utah, and go straight over to Grand Junction, Colorado. We’ll be staying there overnight. You’ll love how the high desert looks this time of year.”
“Six in the morning?” said Taylor, for during the idle days since he lost his business he had fallen into the habit of sleeping until eight o’clock every day.
Mondragon wiped off the last dollop of his stage make-up and was gone without making a reply. Taylor would have liked to ask Mondragon if another Russian language play was in the works. He had taken ten consecutive months of lessons from the beautiful but stern Miss Lubov, and had she been twice as lovely as she was Taylor could not have endured her in his house another day. As his enunciation of Russian improved, and he made fewer and fewer mistakes when she asked him to construct grammatical sentences, she had taken to lecturing him more and more on the shortcomings of American civilization.
“No wonder your poor people are trash,” she said, “if you are a rich man and you are merely intelligent enough to breathe.”
On another occasion she had offered this thought: “This country makes everything big because you think size compensates for your little thoughts. You have big cars, little art. Big rockets, little beliefs. Big houses, big stadiums, dirty little wars. Do you really think the rest of the world hasn’t noticed?”
Taylor thought he was beginning to understand why the birth rate in Russia was falling like a stone dropped down a bottomless well. The country had the good sense to kick out the sour Miss Lubov, yet the Miss Lubovs of the would were undoubtedly like termites--if there was one like her there would be millions more in hiding. Were the other Russian women anything like Alexandra, Taylor understood why Russian men would rather drink vodka than make babies. After his short time with her he was already drinking more whiskey than he did when he was running his business.
As soon as the performance of
The
Seagull
had ended, Taylor hurried home and drank himself into such oblivion he forgot Mondragon was coming for him in the early morning. Somehow Taylor got on board Erin’s big Cadillac SUV. John did not realize where he was until they were east of Reno and deep in the heart of Nevada. Ever his bright breezy self, Mondragon, dressed in a red flannel shirt and khaki pants, was at the wheel when Taylor awoke.
“Ah, coming around, are we?” said Erin. John stirred from his sleep. “You already know Ed,” indicating the other passenger in the front seat. “I don’t think you’ve met Colonel Michael Method, U.S. Army Special Forces, retired.”
Taylor saw across the backseat from himself a sixtyish man wearing a t-shirt on the front of which were emblazoned the wings of the Airborne Rangers and the motto: DEATH FROM ABOVE. The stranger had the body of a thirty-year-old tri-athlete, a blond buzz-cut hairdo the meanest drill sergeant would have worn with pride, and bronzed skin that appeared to be as thick as dragon’s hide. Method wore mirrored sunglasses in which Taylor could see himself make an uneasy smile for the toughest-looking man he had seen outside a B-grade movie.
“Special Forces?” said Taylor. “Really?”
“Colonel Method knew Al Harris,” explained Mondragon. “The Special Forces are but one item on his resume. An interesting man. Very long history.”
The colonel appeared to Taylor as someone having the sort of history that needed to be confessed to a priest. “That is only my first impression,” he told himself. A man Method’s age was probably a grandfather; he might have a pet, and give generously to charities. Those little scars on his cheek and his hands could have come from anywhere. Perhaps he had cut himself opening a can of baby food. My God, he thought, is that a holster he has on his right hip? Maybe he’s a sportsman. Sportsmen have guns, don’t they?
“I was in the Army Reserves,” said Taylor to the ex-soldier. “Once. Years ago. I was a quartermaster, sort of, for a while.”
“I was in the real army,” said Method, looking out the window at the desert.
“I see,” said Taylor and forced himself to chuckle. “Yes, I’m sure the old veterans aren’t much impressed with the Army Reserves. Ha ha.”
Method made no response.
“So,” said Taylor, what do your friends call you? Michael? Mike? You can call me John.”
“We’re both civilians now,” said Method, “so you don’t need to call me ‘sir” or ‘colonel.’ Method will do. Never bother me with that first name crap again.”
Taylor did not know how to react to this. Thankfully Mondragon interrupted the conversation. “Be nice, Method. John is our Russian expert.”
“How long have you been studying Russian?” asked the colonel.
“I speak a little,” said Taylor, stunned that Mondragon called him an expert. “I’m sort of an amateur Russian actor, you might say.”
The ex-military man did not seem to care much for actors. He showed his teeth to Taylor, and John decided the colonel was not smiling.
“He acts to learn,” interjected Mondragon. “A soldier plays war games to get better at war; a student of languages acts to perfect his skills.”
*
The colonel showed deference to Mondragon, if not to Taylor. John concluded that the ex-military man did not know how to act friendly toward others, thus he behaved with indifference toward him. The four of them got on well enough during the rest of the day’s long drive toward the Rockies. They had lunch in a little town named Ely, where there was an authentic Mexican restaurant, and Mondragon presided over their table, telling amusing stories about his ex-wives and girlfriends. Jack wished he had gone on road trips like this one before, instead of working day after day at the office.
“I never had a chance to go through these little towns,” mused Taylor to the others.
“You always worked,” said Mondragon. “When did you last have a vacation?”
We were fighting off the Benton takeover here this last year, thought Taylor. “Let’s see... 1979? Right after my son was born.”
“Did you ever have a vacation?” Mondragon asked Harris.
“Dad’s business always required us to work sixty hour weeks,” said Eddie. “At my aviation company we had to fill—”
“I think the answer is no,” said Mondragon. “Do you ever take vacations, Colonel?”
“My work was like a vacation every day,” said Method. The man’s delivery of his words made it impossible to tell whether he was serious or not.
“We’ll each have lots of vacation time soon,” said Mondragon. “You might enjoy some real time off, Colonel.”
The night had come by the time they reached Grand Junction in Colorado, twenty-six miles east of the Utah border. Taylor would have gone back to sleep during the trip, had he been able to relax while Colonel Method was a few feet from him. John insisted on his own room at the motel that night, lest Mondragon decide he should spend the night in the same room as the strange man with leather skin.
In the morning the four of them had a light breakfast, bought temporary fishing permits at a filling station, and drove to a spot west of the city, where a guide and a large inflated raft awaited them. The Colorado River had fallen to seasonal lows in November. The water was unbelievably cold, colder than John Taylor thought water could get without freezing. On that stretch of river the current gradually narrowed into the tight sandstone canyons common on the Utah side of the border. Only inside the Grand Valley in Colorado was the flood plain wide and overgrown with cottonwood trees that made elongated forests among the millions of acres of sagebrush desert.
Taylor knew nothing of freshwater fishing and was surprised the fish were biting in such cold conditions. Ed Harris snagged a lovely two-pound rainbow trout on his second cast. After Mondragon showed Taylor the basics of putting out a line, even John brought in a brown, several rainbows, and a silvery fish with a high dorsal fin Mondragon identified as a grayling. Mondragon, as Taylor would have expected, knew everything about the river.
“The upper Colorado rises east and north of here,” he told the group on the raft. “The largest dam on the upper drainage area is on the Gunnison tributary east of Montrose, Colorado. That forms the Blue Mesa Reservoir. West of here, in central Utah, the Green River flows into the Colorado, making it a real river. At its highest level in the spring, the river is never more than, oh, about one sixth the flow of the Mississippi. Size doesn’t keep it from being
the
river in the southwest. The three big dams on the upper Green’s drainage are the Strawberry in Utah, the Fontenelle in southwest Wyoming, and the biggest of the three, the Flaming Gorge Dam in the old Brown’s Hole region of northeast Utah, north of Vernal. Did you know, Jack, the term ‘Hole,’ as in Brown’s Hole, Jackson Hole, Hole in the Wall, is an old western term for an outlaws’ hideout?”
Taylor did not know that.
“Back to the river,” Mondragon continued, “every town, every city in this part of America depends on this river. I don’t mean just the irrigation and the drinking water the communities take from the Colorado; I mean every city from here down to Las Vegas and LA needs the electricity this river produces to keep going. If anything should happen to this river, the whole region would suffer an economic collapse. The whole country would be pulled into a depression.”
“Is it going to run away?” said John. Taylor had meant his remark to be mildly ironic, and was baffled when everyone on the raft but himself and the guide laughed aloud at his small jest.
“A comic actor,” said Colonel Method, and slapped Taylor on the back as though the two of them were old pals.
By early afternoon they had floated to a place on the river called Rabbit Valley. There they had to leave the raft or else enter Utah, a state in which they had no licenses to fish.
The outfitting company had a vehicle awaiting the party there and drove the four of them back to the point on the Colorado where they had started in the morning. All four men had enjoyed good luck on the water that day and were in good spirits as they rode in the SUV back to Grand Junction and their evening meal. Taylor noted that Colonel Method seemed to be in an almost jovial mood, or perhaps it was merely that he had not brought a gun on the fishing expedition, and thus appeared less threatening than he had the day before.
“It’s early still,” said Mondragon upon reaching the motel. “Only three o’clock. Why don’t you and the Colonel stay here, Ed. I want to take John up top of the Grand Mesa. There’s something I want to show him.”
“Can’t we do it later,” said Taylor. “I’m freezing.”
“This one time, my friend,” said Mondragon, very nearly pleading. “I’ll turn up the heat. We’ll be back here within the hour. I promise. You don’t want to miss this. We’ll meet you two in the lounge,” he said to Ed and Method. “We won’t be long.”
Taylor and Mondragon drove south of Grand Junction on Highway 50. Rather than drive all the way atop the high Grand Mesa to the Colorado Monument, Mondragon turned onto a dirt road that ran parallel to the river and drove west until the trail took them to higher ground about half way up the side of the mesa. From there the two middle aged men could see north to Douglas Pass and a long course of the Colorado from its descent out of the White River National Forest in the east to its entry into the burnt orange canyon lands to the west. Mondragon gave Taylor his binoculars so he could view the entire panorama.
“I need to ask you something,” said Erin , getting out of the vehicle. He led Taylor to a fallen tree some two hundred feet from the road and asked the other man to sit beside him. “I have to ask you to be quiet for the next five minutes,” he put his hand on Taylor’s forearm. “Don’t say anything until I’ve finished.”
In the next few moments he said things Taylor could not believe he was hearing. But for the strong grip Mondragon kept on his arm, Jack Taylor would have bolted away from his college chum long before Mondragon had completed his speech.
“This is insane!” said Taylor at one juncture. Mondragon kept on speaking.
Taylor sensed the clouds moving overhead and saw the birds, and he thought that these details could not be real, that this was a dream brought on by too much drinking. Maybe, if God were kind, he would awake in his own bed back in San Francisco and never have to worry about this again. When Erin fell silent and let go of his arm, Taylor ran a few steps away from him in the direction of the parked SUV.
“No! No! No!” John pointed with his index finger at the ground each time he said it. “I will have nothing to do with this!”
Mondragon did not respond. He followed his disgruntled friend up the slope at a leisurely pace, stopping twice to turn and look at the river through his binoculars. “This would be the most humane--or perhaps, I should say--the most
human
course of action,” he told Taylor. “We would be giving the nation a dose of reality, at what is really a very low price.”