Deadline Man

“Never know what varmints you might find out here.” He laughs with anticipation.

The desert is quieter than anything I have ever experienced. The silence leaves a vacuum in my brain. A small lizard scurries out of our way and it sounds like a freight train by comparison. The land is also lush in a strange way, with many varieties of spare but lovely plant life. You have to pay attention, but there’s no time. I scan the landscape for humans, the sky for sensors or helicopters. I leave it to Fitz to make our trail.

He aims toward a low arm of the mountain, a rocky hogback, and we walk toward it across the hard, parched ground. My black running shoes turn ochre from the dust. It becomes rocky as we climb and before long my legs are hurting and I’m out of breath. I feel sweat run down my back and thank God the cloud cover is still in place. He still looks like he’s a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant. As I recall, the BAR weighs nearly twenty pounds. It takes us forty-five minutes to reach the top of the ridge. The view is panoramic, reaching far enough that I can see the perfect rectangles of farm fields we left behind miles before.

Below us the vast prison is empty.

Chapter Thirty-nine

The prison backs up to the hogback and its outer buildings form an inverse U, shielding the large interior space from the outside. It’s supposed to look that way. When we had approached from the road, they looked like massive prison buildings, with small windows and dun-colored walls. Now I can see they are fake. Two arms of the U are just tilt-up walls with windows in them. The third leg of the U is a long set of barracks or dorms with doors that open straight out into the yard, and on one part of the rooftop is a freshly-painted helipad with a door that goes down into the structure—hardly the maximum security prison “complex” advertised on the state Web site. The yard is huge—four football fields, at least, and it looks like the back lot of an old Hollywood movie studio.

It contains a street lined with commercial buildings and houses. There are streetlamps, parking meters, a mailbox, newspaper racks. If you stood down there, you might think for a moment you were in a small New Urbanist town center. Closer to us is a range with silhouette targets still in place. Next to it is a tactical range like the cops use, with barricades and false fronts where targets can pop up, giving the officer only a couple of seconds to decide whether it’s friendly or hostile. Somehow I don’t think any police officers have been here.

In fact, nobody’s there. The huge compound looks deserted. No people, no vehicles. Fitz pulls out a pair of Steiner binoculars and scans it. The guard towers are empty. The perimeter road is clear. It’s another Olympic International property that’s deserted, but it looks a hell of a lot more menacing than a closed paper mill.

“I’m gonna look around,” he says, and side-steps his way down the rocky ridge disappearing around a boulder formation.

I stand there and catch the barest breeze. It makes the stiff desert scrub rattle in the silence. Then I go down on my haunches, lay down the gun, and take out my notebook. I sketch the prison complex as best I can, making note of the landmarks, especially the firearms ranges. I use the cell phone to take some bad photos. At that moment, I wish I had the gadgets of a “mojo”—a video cam, a still camera, that would be nice right now. But a twenty-two-year-old mojo with no sense of what he or she knows or needs to learn, with no mentor or good editor, accustomed to writing single-source stories off press releases…well, he or she would never have gotten this far.

“They’re gone.”

I nearly jump out of my skin?

?there’s a lazy journalist cliché, but it’s just what it feels like. Off to my left is a thin man with scruffy puffs of white hair protruding from a cap. His face is as red-brown, permanently sun-scorched, and as rutted and grooved as the desert. It’s a face that looks as if two tectonic plates have collided on it: pinched from the eyes down, but with a wide, high forehead with a dozen deep wrinkles. He’s wearing hiking boots, khaki shorts, and a soiled Harley Davidson wifebeater. He has an amiable voice. He also has a handgun trained on me.

My skin stays detached and my heart rate is so high I can feel it in my ears, but for some reason my tic of a pinching eyelid has gone away. The shotgun is black and beautiful and an impossible distance away from my hand.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” He reads my mind.

All I can do is ask questions. “Where did they go?”

“That’s a pretty piece you got,” he says, using the revolver as a helpful pointer, indicating the Franchi. “Looks like the kind of ordnance they were using.”

“So you watched them?”

“I’d sneak up, just like you. Had to be real careful, ‘cause they’d send out patrols with dogs, helicopters. But nobody knows this mountain better than me.”

“Then it’d be a pity to leave your chunky salsa all over it.”

Fitz Happens.

The scruffy man immediately drops the pistol. It’s a miracle it doesn’t go off. “Holy shit, man…” He speaks in a whisper.

Fitz has flanked us and trains the mean-looking automatic rifle on the man’s mid-section. It looks menacingly long from this angle, the barrel huge, like a hand-held howitzer. He walks closer and orders me to get the revolver. I grab it and my shotgun and stand.

Fitz doesn’t lower the barrel. “So who the fuck are you?”

***

He sits cross-legged on the ground and tells us. His name is Rusty Grayson and he’s lived for almost thirty years in a little hamlet south of us, a place he went when he came home from ‘Nam and wanted to be away from the world. He says he’s a desert rat and nobody knows these mountains better than he does. I tell him my name and newspaper, so everything’s ethical—he knows he’s talking to a journalist now. He says he didn’t realize reporters were so well armed. I take notes while Fitz stands, the BAR resting in the crook of his arm.

Rusty says the prison was built two years ago and immediately “they” showed up. He never knew who they were: a hundred or more men at a time, dressed in camo, looked military but nobody saluted. They’d spend a month down in the compound training, then they’d be replaced by a new group. “Urban warfare,” he says. “That’s what it had to be. They had weapons looked like what you have.” He indicates the Franchi.

“And other badass shit. Looks state of the art. All kinds of sidearms. Armored vehicles. They’d practice clearing houses, taking out snipers, crowd control, what looked like protecting a VIP from bad guys, quick evac. They did some police stuff, like arresting each other, arresting large groups. But most of it was kill-zone city, y’know? Live-fire exercises. Night firing with tracers and that laser-guided shit. It was fun as hell to watch. I’d take station up here and they never found me. I figured they was headed to Eye-rack or Afghanistan. But like I say, something never seemed right. They looked military, but not, you catch my drift. Hell, reporters never been in the military—no offense. Anyway, had to be some super-secret shit, pretending this was a prison and all. You want my two cents? Mercenaries. For what it’s worth. The older you get, the less people want to hear what you say. And you’ve finally got a lot to say. Anyway…”

“You said they’re gone.”

“They are,” he says. I offer him water and he guzzles it. “Pulled out three weeks ago and nobody’s been around until you two. Not even a caretaker down there. But I figured they had electronic surveillance, so I didn’t go in. I coulda cut through those fences, no problem, but I didn’t. This place scared the shit outta me.”