Nightwing (24 page)

“This is the way we stop a fire in an old field,” Piggot said. “We blow it up.”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should have waited so we could bring Paine.”

“Look, we had troubles with fruit bat swarms at our Indonesian wells. We just blasted their roosts. You don’t wait for any so-called expert to do it for you. Or any goddamn ecology study. This is where the vampires are so this is where we’re going to start, and we’re going to keep on until we blow up every goddamn bat cave around here if we have to. That is, if you want any oil revenues. I take it you do.”

“You’re talking about millions of bats. The Hopis aren’t going to stand for that kind of slaughter, not on their land.”

“You want to pull out, Chee, just say the word and we’ll turn around.”

Chee couldn’t pull out, as both men knew. Tribal funds were sunk in low-cost housing, Nevada mortgage speculation, land reclamation, and banking. The operating budget for the next year had a projected deficit of $2 million, a deficit that would bring Indian Bureau investigations of misuse of federal money. In his own mind, Chee’d done nothing wrong. He hadn’t started worldwide inflation, or caused the Nevada mortgages to be foreclosed. But he knew investigations would scare off private investors he’d courted all around the country. On the other hand, the consortium of oil companies Piggot represented was willing to hand over $2 million for a twenty-year lease on the Maski Canyon and a 10 percent royalty on any oil produced. To begin with, Chee thought his only problem was that the canyon was in joint Navajo-Hopi territory. Then the bats came, and the plague.

A red sun was poised over the horizon. Sgt. Begay rode in the lead copter with the white doctor who’d been at the Momoa ranch, and after Youngman’s “impossible” suggestion had made telephone queries from San Diego to Mexico City until he’d found a zoologist who recognized the wounds, and then gone straight to Piggot. Chee fired him. It didn’t matter. As the doctor expected, Piggot paid well enough for the information.

“All I’m saying,” Chee rephrased his protest, “is maybe we should wait and coordinate with Paine. In case some bats get away.”

“Chee, you know how many geologists know more about oil than me? Maybe a thousand and they’re all piss-poor and a lot of them work for me and the reason is that I have nerve. That’s all the oil business is. Nerve and faith. That’s why I’m taking a chance on you. You thought some bats were going to scare me off a strike? See how you wasted time on your expert? You should have come to me at the start.”

“But he knows these bats.”

“And I know dynamite.”

“It’s almost sunset. The bats are going to be coming out.”

“Good. We blow up the ones coming out and seal the rest in for the DDT to finish off.”

“There are a lot of bats.”

“That’s why we’re going to this one first. Look, Chee, you want to be an important man, a hero, and you want to be rich. You go along with us and that’s what you’ll be, and you know it.”

Chee shut his mouth. Piggot was using almost the same argument Chee had used on Duran, only Chee’s argument was a fraud and Piggot’s was the bottom line. It was always the same bottom line on a white man’s contract. The helicopters were Piggot’s, not given to Chee, only loaned for geological surveying.

“Two miles at ten degrees south. We have visual contact,” the lead copter reported.

“Let’s coast.” Piggot took the mike.

Both copters swayed slightly sideways to get a better look at Mansion Mesa, a relatively small mesa with an irregular top and crumbling talus walls that did suggest a dilapidated, oversized mansion set down in the middle of the desert. In the full furnace gaze of the setting sun, the mesa glowed orange-hot. A layer of volcanic rock made the mesa top uninhabitable for humans, but the center of the mesa was hollow, a vast cavern occupied by blind salamanders, beetles, cockroaches, coral snakes, pseudoscorpions, and hundreds of colonies of different bats.

“You’re sure anything lives in that?” Piggot asked Chee.

“Yes.”

“We better swing by first,” Piggot ordered over the radio.

The two copters made a circuit around the walls of the mile-wide mesa, watching their silhouettes swim over the walls. The sound of turboprop engines boomed off the rocks.

“Bats!” the first copter called.

On the south wall, about twenty feet from the mesa lip, perhaps a dozen bats straggled into the daylight and dived to the shadow line rising from the desert floor.

“We’re going around again,” Piggot ordered.

“That’s the main entrance,” Chee disagreed. “You don’t know how fast the sun drops. We have to do it now.”

The copters made a second circuit, closer this time, their rotors almost grazing the mesa walls. As they came around to the south, without spotting another entrance, Chee saw that the sun had dropped to its waist. A shadow line of misty blue was directly under the cave entrance and a thin but solid string of bats fluttered out.

“Okay, this is going to be harder than we hoped,” Piggot spoke into the mike. “We can’t just drop the bombs. We’re going to have to fly by and sling them in. The dynamite has a ten-second delayed contact fuse so you don’t have to worry as long as you don’t go into a stop hover. We’ll stand off and, in case you miss, we’ll go in with our load. Let’s do it right the first time, though. And don’t forget your helmets. There’s a chance some of these bats are infected and we don’t want to take any chances.”

Piggot was already taking chances, Chee thought.

“Tell them to go.”

“Hold on, Chief. I said we were going to do it right. Look, the bats aren’t even coming out now.”

The shadow line was halfway up the cavern mouth and rising even as Chee watched. The lead copter backed off a hundred yards while the one carrying Chee and Piggot drifted fifty yards alongside. There was a pause as the men in each aircraft fastened the helmets of their coveralls. They wouldn’t be in them long enough to require air tanks. Chee started sweating immediately as more bats emerged. The shadow line touched the top of the cavern entrance. Most of the desert was now a blue pool.

“Ready,” the radio announced.

“A $100 bonus for every man who bowls a strike,” Piggot told them.

Chee watched Begay get strapped to each side of the Huey’s open bay. A satchel charge was handed to Begay. The two copters seesawed in the air. More bats were coming out of the cavern, speckling the air.

“What are they waiting for?”

“Relax,” Piggot told Chee.

Begay gave a thumbs up. The lead copter dipped its nose and advanced towards the mesa.

“Keep it at five knots until he throws it and then scram. Good hunting!” Piggot called.

The copter aimed towards the cavern at a 20 degree angle. Begay and the charge were obscured from the second copter’s view. A small cloud of about a hundred bats slipped from the cave. Steadily, resolutely, the copter swung towards the mesa wall.

The next seconds were confused in Chee’s mind and always would be. The cavern erupted not with hundreds of bats or thousands but with tens of thousands of guano bats, cave bats, red bats, canyon bats, fringed bats, in all close to 500,000 bats as Mansion Mesa spilled out its colonies, the way the mesa always released its bats at sunset, until the helicopter, the mesa, and half the sky were erased by a moving, screaming cloud and Chee’s copter almost spun to the ground as it listened to a radio shouted, “Bats! The bats . . .” The sound of their wings overpowered even the howling of the copter’s jet engine. Chee never heard the crash of the lead copter into the mesa wall, only that pounding like heavy rain until the charge went off at the base of the mesa, scattering what was left of Begay and the copter over the sands.

C H A P T E R
S E V E N

T
he day began hot and windless. There was no movement or shade, or even dimension to be seen. Only the searing white light that evaporated life.

At 6
A.M.
, a general plague alert had come over the Rover’s AM radio, followed an hour later by evacuation orders for everyone between the Black Mesa to the north and Castle Butte to the south, and Dinnebito Wash to the west and Route 87 to the east. By 8
A.M.
, the orders from Window Rock were reversed and occupants of the previously mentioned area were instructed to stay where they were, to avoid public gatherings, fumigate their homes and themselves, not to approach any wild animals or any sick domestic animals, to report any unusual wounds or boils or fever. Also, to burn their dead and to stay in, doors and windows shut, at night. In effect, a quarantine of approximately 2500 square miles. And at night, a siege.

“Just the start.” Paine spread a map. Circles and dates marked every incident concerning the vampires or plague. “Winslow and Flagstaff are only thirty miles outside the area. Wait and see what happens when the plague reaches there.”

“What are these other marks?” Anne asked.

“The X’s are sound trackings of the vampires. The triangles are major bat colonies. Mansion Mesa south, Stephen Butte east, San Francisco Mountain caves west. There are millions of bats in the mountain caves. If the vampires move in there and the fleas spread?”

“What then?”

“You can drop Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico off the map of the United States for a start.”

“We’re dropping them now, we’re getting out.” Youngman returned from pouring the last jerry can of gasoline into the Land Rover. “Once we get past Route 89, there’s a dirt road I know that’ll get us up to the Grand Canyon paths. No one will know we came out of the quarantine.”

“I only promised to take you to the highway,” Paine said.

“You heard the radio. We’d be picked up in a minute on the highway now and stuffed into a ward full of people with plague. That’s no escape. We’re going to the Grand Canyon, all of us.”

“I’m not leaving the desert,” Paine said.

“That’s up to you. We are, and so’s the truck.”

“I need the Rover.”

“Not like we do.”

While the two men argued, Anne walked off by herself and sat beside a withered saguaro. The pulp of the cactus was eaten away, leaving the ribs as open as a cage. Farther on, the iterated S’s of a sidewinder’s track decorated the sand. Beyond was flatness extending to the horizon, which was clear and extraordinarily fine even through the vibration of heat waves. A line so long and unbroken and without any margin, the same line she had concentrated on when she was dying. Dying, she had decided this was the place to die. And the way to die, because she’d lied to Youngman, she’d given up hope of any rescue and being free of that hope, and knowing she’d survived as well and as long as she could alone and without help, she’d reached an unexpected clarity of thought. A clarity of life. Franklin had reached it before his death. It was a sudden gift of the desert, not so much a conscious understanding as an extension of the senses so that she could feel the dry breeze cool within her, see the distant mesas sitting like brown women, be a very part of the desert. It was an absolution from her executioner, this awareness. Perhaps it never was the Indians or the petty ego-satisfaction of volunteerism that had brought her into the desert and to this point. Perhaps it was a lifelong drift towards reality. Because Phoenix was a dream, a false oasis. Youngman wasn’t false, only his aspirations of leaving the desert were. Her visions had been real, seeing him run over the sand, because he was a desert animal and he’d never leave it without killing more than half of himself. If she wanted him, she would have to take him whole. Why had he and she been spared the bats and the plague? Why had the desert done that for them? She scooped up sand and let it run like water over her broken fingers.

Youngman lifted his rifle, levered a bullet into the breech, and aimed at Paine’s head.

“Give me the keys.”

“You’ll have to kill me.”

“To save us, I’d do it. Throw the keys.”

“There are more lives at stake. Your people, the Navajos, everyone in the desert. And that’s just the start.”

“It’s not the end of the world,” Youngman said. He would have fired at that point, but he was suddenly looking at a memory of Abner. Then Anne interrupted.

“Beside you,” she asked Paine, “who else can stop the bats?”

“No one. There are experts in vampire control in Mexico City, but it would take them a week to organize a team. By then the bats will move to a new cave and the plague will be out of control. It may be out of control now.”

“How?”

“A bullet,” Paine looked at Youngman’s gun, “only kills the person it hits. Every victim, man or animal, bitten by the bats becomes a vector, a spreader of the plague. Ask your friend how fast the plague has spread in a couple days. From a few square miles to a few hundred square miles. Geometrically. The more area it covers, the more the rate of spread accelerates. You can probably imagine what will happen if one human vector reaches a major city or an airport. Or even a motel near the Grand Canyon.”

“Is it possible Youngman or I do have the plague?”

Paine took longer to answer.

“It’s possible.”

“And you know where the bats are.”

“Almost exactly. I’ve been tracking their flight paths for five nights. I know the area of their cave. Of course, they could move to a different cave any time, unless I stop them now.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Youngman said. “You don’t have plague now. We can get to California. We’ll never have to hear about the reservation again. Remember what you told me? We could go anyplace in the world together.”

Anne shook her head.

“I’m staying.”

“You’re going. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know what I’m talking about. For two years I’ve gone around this reservation doing nothing but handing out band-aids and eye salves. That’s next to doing nothing, Youngman, and that was two years of my life. Maybe I did something good for the people, I hope I did. Now you want me to be responsible for letting those people die? To throw away those years? To run away the first time I can really matter? If you want to run, go ahead. But I’m not going with you.”