Independence Day: Silent Zone (23 page)

While
his
passengers held on tight, Freiling, who hadn't driven anything in over
twenty
years, pushed the Cadillac engine up to seventy miles per hour while
Dworkin
did his part by holding Radecker and the rest of the procession at bay.

Running over traffic
islands, scattering pedestrians, and ignoring his passengers' pleas for
him to
slow down,
trailing pointed the nose of
the machine at the center of the road and roared straight through town.
They
were headed for the Tropicana, but their driver was so focused on
weaving
through traffic he didn't see it until it was nearly too late.
What, here
already?
he asked himself, and pulled the wheel hard to the
right, steering
toward what looked like a driveway. While several nearby cars swerved,
skidded,
and crashed into one another, Freiling ran the hearse onto a curb,
blowing out
the two front tires. Undaunted, he plowed through some of the
landscaping, over
another curb, and up to the Tropicana's front doors. While dumb-pounded
valets
looked on, the three elderly fugitives, assisted by their younger
accomplice,
jogged through the front doors.

It
wasn't
long before Radecker pulled up, but long enough for the old cardsharps,
who
knew the building well, to make themselves hard to find. Half an hour
after
they'd disappeared through the front doors, he had forty men scouring
the
building in a door-to-door search. And just in case they'd somehow
managed to
slip out, he called in the sheriff's office and the Highway Patrol to
set up a
perimeter around the entire city. They were searching every car headed
out of
town. Radecker asked himself where the old men would go if they had
already
fled the building and, to his credit, he guessed right. He jumped in
the van
and tore down the street. A short distance later, he parked the car on
the
street outside Parducci Savings and ran inside.

Salvatore Parducci
was in the middle of counting a stack of bills and didn't want to lose
count.
He ignored Radecker's questions about seeing three old
men in suits until a hand swept
across the counter and
scattered the money on the floor. When Sal looked up, Radecker had a
pistol
pointed at his face. "Yes, sir, how can we help you today?"

"Where
are they, damn it? They're hiding in here, aren't they?"

"The
three old men? We got a lot of retired people as customers. Can you
describe
them for me?" In the background there was a sudden high whine that
sounded
like an electric motor.

"Lenel,
Cibatutto, and Freiling," Radecker said, coming around the counter to
search the office. "Recognize those names?"

"Very
well. My family has been doing business with them for many years."
Parducci held his hands away from his body. He remained perfectly still
and
perfectly relaxed, even when Radecker kicked open one of the locked
office
doors to look inside.

"When's
the last time you saw them?"

"You're
not with the IRS, are you?"

"What's
that?" The whine of the motor had turned to a hollow slapping sound.

"What's
what?"

"That
noise?"

"Oh,
the noise. That thupa-thupa-thupa sound? That would be Parducci
Enterprises' helicopter."

Radecker
rushed to the window and tore back the curtains in time lo catch a
glimpse of
his employees lifting off. He turned back to the heavily bejeweled
banker, who
explained, "We're a full-service financial institution."

By
the time Radecker's second APB in as many months went out to
law-enforcement officials across the western U.S., the fugitive
scientists were
renting a car with cash at Ontario Airport in California.

With Okun at
the helm, the crew headed south.
The rental agency had put them into a brand-new Ford LTD station wagon,
which
bobbed and weaved down the freeway like a small yacht. Their plan was
to slip
across the border at Tijuana as quickly as possible. During Okun's last
AWOL
escapade, Radecker had mobilized a small army to find him. They could
only
imagine what kind of dragnet he'd set up this time.

Okun had
never been to Mexico, so he
didn't realize anything was strange when he pulled up to the San Diego
side of
the border and found himself in a long line of traffic waiting to go
across.

"Something's not right here," Lenel said, leaning forward from the backseat. "There's supposed
to
be a line on the
other
side, not this one. Entering
Mexico should be
faster than this."

"Maybe
things have changed
since the last time you came down here." Okun shrugged.

"No. Turn
around and get out of
here," Lenel told him. But it was too late for that. They were in the
middle of seven lanes of one-way traffic. So the older men quickly
devised Plan
B. One by one they slipped out of the station wagon and made their way
to the
footbridge. They would wait for one of the many tour groups crossing
into
Tijuana for a day of shopping and blend in with them. Okun thought they
were
being a little too careful at the time, but when he approached the gate
he saw
two men in suits and sunglasses walking back and forth, looking into
every car.
When one of them came close to him, Okun flashed him a peace sign and a
smile.
The man moved on without changing expression to continue his hunt.
Has
Radecker figured out where we're headed
? Okun wondered. Then,
he thought
about the complicated path he'd taken to deduce the location of this
second
spacecraft.
Naw. Radecker won't figure it out.

"Where are
you headed?"
the uniformed border guard asked when Okun pulled even with the booth.

"Ensenada."

"What's the
purpose of your
visit?"

"
Mucho
tequila."

The guy
smiled, told him to drive
safely, and waved him through.

He found the
three old men waiting
for him a hundred yards up the road. They climbed in, and off they
went. Once
they found their way to the road they wanted and were out of town, Okun
drove
twenty miles an hour faster than the rutted roads would allow.

That night,
they pulled into the
mountain town of Nuevo Gasas Grandes about 10:30, expecting to find the
place
completely dead, out of commission until morning. All the way up the
twisting
road that took them into the foothills of the dry Sierra Madre
mountains, they
saw downed telephone poles and freshly broken cinder-block houses. But,
in the
"Grandes," there was little evidence of the huge earthquake that had
rolled through the town a week before. The main street was lined with
old
wood-frame buildings. The brightest, loudest place on the block was the
Taverna
Terazas, which stood directly opposite the town's church. A jukebox
inside
filled the street with sound, adding to the noisy chug-a-lug of
portable
generators. A dozen men sat outside the bar, talking and laughing,
chairs
tipped back against the wall.

Lenel,
Freiling, Cibatutto, and
Okun, all of them still dressed in the suits they'd worn to Dworkin's
funeral,
parked the car and walked down the center of the street. Striding four
abreast,
they looked like a not-very-threatening group of gunslingers. The men
outside
the saloon were tough-looking dudes, vaqueros who looked like the real
deal:
dusty leather boots, dungarees, and Western shirts. They stopped
laughing when
the Norte Americanos walked up.

"
Hola,
amigos
,"
Okun called as he
walked past them and through the front doors. The scientists followed
him
inside. The small bar was almost full. Okun came in and took a table
near the
jukebox, which was playing a rowdy ranchero song. Conversation lulled
for a
minute while the men at the bar turned around to have a look at these
four
dressed-up gringos, but then resumed. When a waitress walked past, Okun
ordered
them four beers, then leaned in over the table. "Once we find the
Silent
Zone, we'll drive down the line of power poles, and I'll find the
point-of-view
angle I got from the screen. I'll stand in the same relation to the
power pole
I saw in the image on the screen."

"You
remember it well
enough?"

"Trust me.
It's Etch-A-Sketched
across the inside of my brain."

"How are we
going to find out
where this place is?" Freiling asked.

Lenel
motioned toward the bar.
"Judging from the uniforms of those men at the bar, they work for the
electric company. We could follow them out there in the morning."

"I have a
better idea."
Cihatutto announced. He paused to hand the waitress a twenty for the
beers, and
told her to keep the change. "We hire a guide."

"It better
be somebody we don't
like very much," Lenel warned darkly, "because if we actually
discover an alien ship, he might not live very long."

Okun saw how
it could work out.
"Dr. C's right. It'll be faster if we have somebody who can take us out
there. If we find a ship, we do our best to hide it from him. Two of us
can
stay out there while the two others ride back into town with the guy to
call in
our reinforcements. If he finds out about it, too bad for him. There's
too much
riding on this."

"Slow down,
kid, you're
starting to sound like Victor Frankenstein," Lenel said.

Freiling had
been waiting for a lull
in the conversation. He turned to Cibatutto. "I'm still wondering why
you
gave that waitress so dang much money?"

The answer
walked up to the table. A
skinny young mestizo kid, maybe seventeen, came over to their table,
turned a
chair around, and straddled it. "You wanna buy some pots?"

Okun did a
double take. "Buy
some huh?"

"Pots.
Bowls. Ceramicas."
He explained in plain English how Americans sometime came to Grandes
wanting to
buy pottery robbed from burial sites of the Mogollon Indians. He
pronounced the
word mo-go-YON. Others came to see the caves the Mogollon had once
lived in.

"We're not
here for pots. We
want to go out to the Silent Zone." Okun pulled the rolled-lip
newspaper
out of his pocket and showed it to the kid. "You know anybody who can
take
us to this place?"

"We will pay
a hundred
dollars," Cibatutto added.

"Me!" the
kid yelled.
"I'll take you. I'm not afraid of la Zona."

"Done. But
only if we leave by
dawn.
Temprano en el manana
," Okun said, reaching
across the table
to seal the deal with a handshake. "What's your name?"

"Pedro."
The cocky kid was grinning like he'd just swindled the gringos out of a
million
dollars. If he had known the risk he was taking, he would have asked
for much
more. Not only could he guide them to the Silent Zone, but he could
lead them
to the only hotel in town, and, for an extra few bucks, he would take
care of
getting the food and water stockpiled. He'd learned English living in
Los
Angeles for nine years, but his father decided it wasn't a good place
for kids
to be growing up and moved them back here to their hometown. Now Pedro
was sitting
around in bars offering strangers black-market artifacts robbed out of
graves.
The four men made a list of all the items they would need for the next
day.

"Why do you
wanna go out
there?"

The four men
looked at one another
uncertainly.

"Can you
keep a secret?"
Okun asked.

"Yeah, of
course."

"You really
promise not to tell
anyone?"

"Yeah, of
course."

"We're
treasure hunters,"
he whispered. "We work for a mining company, and we think these hills
are
loaded with treasure."

The kid came
out of his slouch and sat
straight up. "You mean gold and silver?"

"No. I'm
talking about iron
ore, millions of tons of it. We read about the Silent Zone and said to
ourselves, there must be iron ore up there."

That sounded
boring, and the kid
lost interest immediately which was just what Okun intended.

Early the next
morning, they met him outside their hotel. He'd found most of the
supplies
they'd ordered except the flashlights. He explained, however, that he'd
gone
into the church across the street and taken a bag full of candles.
"I'll
pay 'em back later." An hour before the first construction crews got
rolling, the scientists followed their guide s directions to the edge
of town,
where they turned onto a dirt road. They headed out, driving the
station wagon
where it was never meant to go. They bounced along a badly rutted
utility road,
which carried them deeper into the hills. Eventually, they rounded a
turn and
found themselves in a huge flat valley at least ten miles wide. "This
is
the Valley of the Caves," Pedro told them. More than a valley, it was a
huge open plain, largely barren. Towering in the distance were the
Y-shaped
power poles. Beyond them, sharp vertical cliffs led the way to endless
hills
climbing to distant peaks. Even from that distance, they could see that
some of
the tall poles were listing, damaged by the earthquake. As they
approached the
lines, they saw cranes, giant spools of wire, and other construction
equipment.
Some of the power lines had broken away from the poles.

They asked
Pedro about the Mogollon
Caves he had mentioned the night before. He told them what he'd learned
from
the black-market art buyers. The Mogollon Indians had built the caves
and lived
in them for centuries until they suddenly disappeared about five
hundred years
ago. He explained how Mogollon, like other tribes in the region, tied
cradleboards to the heads of infants, in order to cause deformations of
the
skull. They weren't natural, somehow, the kid said. Their heads were
weirdly
shaped, they made extraordinary pottery, and they built great cities
like
Paquime, then vanished suddenly without a trace. Their entire
civilization
abruptly ceased to exist, and no one knew why.