The Mescalero Project (eBook)

CHAPTER ONE

Moss wasn’t more than thirty meters from the entrance but didn’t realize it. He stood looking out from the shade of the red rock escarpment that breached the flat desert landscape, arching its spine toward the east. The only irregularity in the smooth sweep of terrain out in front of him was a sandy knoll to the southeast.

He had walked a grid pattern back and forth through the sagebrush and mescal and ocotillo since noon without success. His clothes and the bandana tied about his head were soggy with sweat, and his eyes ached from the scorching sun despite the expensive sun shields he had bought for the trip. There had at least been spots along the access road in from the two-lane, visible now and then, where the wind had bared the shoulder enough to keep him from driving off into the soft sand. But right where his comsat compass confirmed the coordinates shown on the blueprints, there was no sign anything had ever existed here but sand drifts and mesquite, cholla and tumbleweed and saguaro.

In the suffocating late afternoon heat, he busied himself setting up camp, determined to keep doubt from staining his hopes. He rigged a shade break with a tarp off the side of the pickup to two tent poles and set his camp chair and table under it. He had decided not to bother with the tent this first night. He would sleep in the open in his bivouac bag.

The shadows cast by the saguaro stretched farther and farther as the sun slipped lower in the desert sky. He put a pot of water on the camp stove he’d set on the tailgate, and when it came to a boil emptied a pouch of dehydrated beef and vegetables into it. While it simmered and the water thickened to a more or less satisfying broth, he went looking for firewood. It was cold at night in the desert even in June.

When he returned the stew was ready. With a small campfire under way just beyond the shade break, he opened a tube of saltine crackers and sat eating at the table under the tarp. The landscape was in deepening shadow, the sky turning from sanguine to purple as the sun dropped behind a butte off in the distance to the northwest. He threw a piece of mesquite on the fire now and then, watching the flames dance higher again, casting swirls of sparks up into the rapidly chilling night air. As he dipped saltines into the stew, he was aware of how odd the smell was, the aroma of stew mingled with the odor of a sweat-soaked man and the bone-bleached scent of the desert sand.

This was the first time since starting out that he’d taken a break of any duration. All at once he realized how weary he was after a weeklong drive and merciless heat, then crisscrossing acres of spiny desert underbrush on foot and finding nothing. He wondered if he had come on a fool’s errand.

He awoke before daylight. The cold desert air had settled on his face and on his ears exposed as they were to the night. Lying there in his bivouac bag, staring up at the glory of the heavens, he became aware of a weight on his hips, like when his cat, Charlemagne, slept on the covers. 

He started to get up, but the instant he moved he heard the unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake. Moss became as still as a stone, feeling the movement of the snake on top of him, as it wound itself into a new coil. His heart was pounding and he could hardly take a breath, terrified the snake would strike his face or throat from where it was coiled over his groin. He waited, taking the shortest of breaths, trying not to move, though he was starving for air. He realized it probably crawled up there to stay warm during the night, as he tried to think what to do. Coming daylight began to reveal the shapes around him. Moss slowly lifted his head high enough to see down the length of the bivouac bag. The snake, with a girth as thick as his forearm, was coiled two feet away, staring at him.

He slid his forearms slowly up to his shoulders. If he felt the snake move, he froze and waited. Once he could reach the zippers, he began undoing them, on one side then the other, trying to keep his pelvis as level and still as possible. When they were undone enough to throw up a block with the upper half of the bivouac bag, he took a deep breath and made his move. The thump of the rattler striking at the thick insulated flap sounded like a fighter’s jab hitting a heavy bag. Moss scrambled out of the jumble of material and sprinted a half-dozen meters away. He looked back and saw the big rattler slither off in the opposite direction, disappearing into the sagebrush. He rekindled the fire and stood warming himself, breathing in the sharp scent of mesquite, aware that his quivering stomach and the shaking in his hands had little to do with the cold.

As the sun edged above the horizon to the northeast, he noticed something unusual: A dozen or more saguaro cacti stood in a line—much too straight a line to be natural—and they were spaced evenly apart. He walked to the nearest one and began to grin. It wasn’t a cactus at all, but a ventilator made to look like one. It had to be one of the ventilators for the underground office complex of The Mescalero Project.

Moss ran back to the pickup and grabbed the building plans to see where the entrance was in relation to the ventilators. It would be just about where the sandy knoll was. He hurried over to it and worked his way up the loose, sloughing sand to the top. Something caught his attention. He knelt down, brushing and sweeping the sand away with his hands, exposing what he guessed was the corner of a roof. It had to be the roof of the stairwell to the complex. Grinning more broadly, as he turned to climb down off the knoll, he caught a muted glint of light to the northeast. He squinted, looking in that direction. There, camouflaged by the superfine dust of decades that softened the glare of its crystal surface, was the dome, hidden in a box canyon that ran north and south, only the southern tip of it evident. If he hadn’t been standing there just then to catch the softly reflected sunlight, he would not have noticed it. With renewed enthusiasm, he headed back to the pickup to secure the camp and grab something to eat, eager to get started excavating the door to the stairwell.

He ate quickly and as soon as he finished and had taken a long drink from his canteen, he grabbed his shovel and went back over to the knoll. He shoveled all morning, in the stifling heat, cursing the blisters blossoming in the palms of his hands.

By the time the sun was directly overhead, much of the sand had sloughed down off the roof, and the upper half of the doorway was uncovered enough to try the latch. It was locked and the solid steel door was too much to pry open with any tools he had, but he was happy to see that it opened outward. This would be a real advantage with what he had in mind. And fortunately, the stairwell roof was only eight feet high according to the plans. Any higher than that and he’d have been at this for another day for sure.

The sand on the knoll that had built up around the stairwell over the years was wind dried, being above the surface of the terrain. Moss was grateful for this as it held no moisture and so was light and almost like paddling water as he worked. In his excitement, even with the threshold not quite clear, he could stand no more. Moss went after his pickup.

So, in the late afternoon, with all wheel drive set and a chain carefully hooked to the door handle so as not to break it away from the door, Moss put the pickup in gear and gently tugged the door open. The dry sand flew everywhere as the door broke loose, but still on its hinges. He grabbed the prism lantern and the calcion torch he’d bought, locked the rest of his gear in the pickup, and stepped across the threshold. He felt butterflies in his belly just like the day he began his first archaeological dig junior year in undergraduate school.

He set the beam of the torch to broad configuration and started down the stairs. It was wonderfully cool as he descended. Cobwebs hung thick from the ceiling, like dirty lace, swaying with his every move. He wouldn’t have been able to see his hand just inches from his face without the panoramic illuminating flood of the torch in the thick darkness of the chamber.

At the bottom of the stairwell to his right was the door to the offices, and to his great relief, it wasn’t locked. He crossed the threshold cautiously. The first, most obvious thing was the musty odor. He set the lantern on a desk covered in a layer of dust and lit it, scanning the room quickly in the brilliant light. Monitor screens at the workstations stared back at him blankly.

Torch in hand, he moved around the room. At one point he glanced down and noticed the tracks he was leaving in the dust. He hadn’t considered this before and wondered, then walked back to the door and shined his torch out into the tunnel. No prints but his. This put him more at ease. He resumed his exploration of the room, rummaging through desk drawers, flipping through documents and manuals. It was clear the computer system monitored and managed the security and life support in the complex, and he was impressed by the sophistication of the electronic technology back in the ’20s.

At the back corner of the room, to the left, a door opened into a restroom equipped with an archaic crematic commode like the ones he remembered using in grade school. He needed to piss and set the torch down on the sink. When he had finished, he pushed the flush button and the drum in the bottom of the toilet made a half rotation enclosing the fluid inside, and he heard the incinerator ignite. A moment later the drum turned open again, empty and dry, ready for the next use. He turned on...