C
HAPTER
F
IVE
The Central Valley, near Coalinga
Danny moved closer, to make sure that he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing.
At first glance, it looked like a water stain on the concrete. The freeway underpasses were a riot of abstract designs caused by the rush of occasional rainwater from the road above to the constantly thirsty land below. With a little imagination, you could always make out something—the World Trade Center here, a rutabaga there. Not that, under normal circumstances, anybody ever stopped under an overpass in order to discover some
l’art trouvé,
but these were hardly normal circumstances.
The Mexicans were deep into the rosary now, praying with renewed fervor. These were the good, religious, hardworking people from an ancient culture, family people, descendents both of the conquistadors and the Indians, of Cortés and Juan Diego. Coming to America, thought Danny, may have improved them financially, but it had diminished them culturally, with what unknown consequences the next generations of both Mexicans and Americans would have to discover.
Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia . . .
Gently, he moved forward, toward the object of their veneration. Some of the candles had guttered out already, but fresh votives had already replaced them, flickering in the breeze.
He thought he knew what he saw, but he had to make sure....
Closer now and closer still . . .
A large woman blocked his way. The crowd, which was growing in size by the minute, pressed forward, knocking him into her. “Excuse me, señora,” he said, but it was no use apologizing because the press of humanity was too strong and he found himself propelled ever forward until, like water bursting through a dam, he went sprawling into a small clearing.
Behind him was the crowd, a mixture of awe and wonder on their faces. Before him were the candles, their hot melted wax running down the pavement. And above him was . . .
A Face. The face of a woman. The most beautiful face he had ever seen.
Her eyes were half-closed, her gaze downward, a look of ineffable sadness and suffering—and yet of peace and even joy—upon her visage. She was wearing what the kids today called a hoodie, which concealed most of her hair, revealing only her face and a bit of her throat.
“Who is it?” he found himself whispering, prone, worshipful.
“
Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe
,
señor
,” someone said.
“Who?” He should have known. Every Angeleno, whether Latino or Anglo, knew the Virgin of Guadalupe, the miraculous image impressed by the Lady upon the cloak of the Indian, Juan Diego, in 1531. It was one of the first recorded apparitions of the Virgin in the New World. It ensured the conquest of Latin America by Catholicism, and it turned Juan Diego into the first native American saint. And the cloak remained to this day in the
Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe
in Mexico City.
Powerful voodoo, if you believed. Powerful even if you didn’t.
As one look at the Face would tell you.
He looked at Her, right in the eyes—
Miracles were curious things. Like pornography, you could not define them, but you knew one when you saw it. It wasn’t as if she looked directly at him—great images, like the Mona Lisa, did that all the time, the eyes following you around the room, out the door and across the street—but she may as well have, for the effect it had on him. Not just at him, but
in
him and
through
him and
with
him, just like in the doxology, the one he had had learned so many years ago, before reality had intervened, and the world had taken his breath away.
Suddenly, unbidden, the words of the Eucharistic prayer came back to him, half-remembered, as in a dream, but tantalizing and near . . .
Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso . . .
What was the rest of it? He couldn’t remember
He took a deep breath. The fetid smell of the bovine corpses lying just over the freeway was already wafting over. Something terrible had happened, and he needed to know what it was. He glanced back to his car, to see if Hope and the kids were all right, but the crowd was too large, and getting larger every moment.
There was no way out: he was penned in on all sides by the locals, mostly Mexicans now, he could see, who had been joined by a few Anglos, landowners most likely. The primitive illumination of the candles had given way to the powerful flashlights of the farmers, who had augmented their torches with shotguns. Whatever had happened, it required firearms to deal with.
“What the hell is going on here?” barked a big man. He was at the head of a group of white men, the only one unarmed, and he moved through the crowd of Latinos as if he owned them, which he probably did.
The crowd parted like the Red Sea, and soon enough Danny found himself looking up at the big man, who prodded him with his boot.
“Don’t do that,” said Danny softly. He was still processing what he had seen just now, and was in no mood for a reality intervention just yet.
“I said,” repeated the man, “what the hell is going here? There are dead cows from here to Stockton, and I want to know why.”
The Mexicans were backing away, their candles flickering out. Struggling, Danny forced himself into a sitting position, from which he could get a view of the car. Damn! Rory was getting out, a young man coming to the aid of an older man, a man not his father but who soon would be, at least in the eyes of the law and perhaps even, if he played his cards right, of the Lord....
“Rory, stay in the car!” shouted Danny.
“I asked you a question,” said the big man, which interrogatory was followed by another prod, this one closer to a kick—
Big mistake.
In a flash, Danny flipped to his feet, whirled, and dropped the man with a high kick to the Adam’s apple. Two throwing knives shot from his sleeves, pinioning the trigger hands of two of the armed men. Quick, vicious punches brought down the others. It was all over in less than a minute, just the way he had been trained so long ago, in the special forces and the 160th SOAR.
In another time, in another life, Danny might have made sure his opponents were down for the count, unable to rise and hurt him. But now he didn’t care. It was not that he had lost his edge, but that he had found a new one—a higher power than the ones he formerly had answered to. He didn’t know what it meant, wasn’t sure what he would do with this newfound clarity, but it didn’t matter. He still had more to learn, and that was what some power had brought him here, at this moment, to do.
The past sloughed off—all of it. The military operations, the night flights into Iraq and other places in the world he never talked about, never admitted, the contract with Blackwater, now called Xe—none of that mattered anymore. It was past, gone, and yet . . . and yet the past was always prologue to whatever new life was coming your way.
Embrace the suck
, was the old motto in Iraq. Well, he was embracing it now.
In the distance, he could hear car doors opening and shutting. His car. He knew it was his car. Rory was already out, and so now it was the women, the women he was suddenly responsible for, not just his daughter Jade, wounded in the terrorist bombing of the Grove but now by the grace of God healthy and well, but Hope and her daughter Emma, poor kidnapped Emma, for whose rescue he had flown into the heart of that bastard Skorzeny’s prison in France.
Mission accomplished. Emma was restored to her mother and her brother, and Jade restored to life. Both he and Hope had lost their spouses—she in the siege of Edwardsville, he in Los Angeles—but somehow she had found him and together they were becoming stronger than they had ever been in the past.
It had never been personal before—not even during the darkest days in Iraq. He had a job to do, and he did it. The body count was not his concern. He was a warrior, trained and sent into action by his country; if he had had to live with one of those JAG monkeys on his back, he never would have made it out of country alive. But now, after all that had happened—to him, his family, to Hope, her family, and to their country—it very much was personal. He could only hope—and, now, pray—that he would be the divine instrument of infinite justice.
The Mexicans had pulled away from the crazy gringo. The white men were down. And now he found himself swarmed by the people in his life whom he most loved. Hope and Rory and Emma. And Jade. Always brave Jade.
Who was staring at the image on the wall. If Danny thought he was empathetic, Jade was positively telepathic. She got it from her mother, Diane. . . .
For a long time Jade said nothing, just took in the image of the woman, the mother, the Blessed Mother, her sorrow, her tears.
“What is it, Jade?” asked Danny softly. “What is she saying?”
Still, Jade said nothing. Danny knew better than to press her. Teenage girls were never to be rushed. They could see things others could not, hear things audible only to a special few. As they bloomed and blossomed, they not only transformed themselves, they transformed the world—sacred vessels, receptive, the gateway to the unknown, the promise, and the future.
“What does she want?” whispered Danny to his daughter. He had to learn her secret.
What was she trying to tell him? What was she trying to tell all of them? Not just those present, but everyone in the Central Valley, everyone in California, the country, the world? Had she witnessed whatever calamity lay just outside the sacred circle of candle fire?
She had something to say—but what?
Jade shuddered a little, then stepped back, coming out of a kind of trance. She nodded to the image, then turned to her father.
“What did you say, Daddy?” she asked.
Danny waited a moment. “What?” he hissed. “What did she say?”
Hope moved toward them. “Danny,” she said softly. “Let Jade—”
“No,” said Danny. Then, to Jade: “You heard something?”
In the distance now, sirens. Lots of them. Sirens coming from both the north and the south, their wails building in harmony with the scope of the disaster. The stench was becoming overpowering. They had to get out of here, go on north, on to San Francisco, toward their hotel, the restaurant, the moonlight walk near Fort Point.
“Hear something,” replied Jade. “I
hear
something. She’s talking to me. To you. To all of us.”
Rory looked at the image on the wall. “Awesome!” he exclaimed.
Protectively, Hope threw her arms around the children. Neither Jade nor Danny moved.
“What is she saying, darling?” asked Danny. The sirens were very near now.
Jade moved toward the wall, on which the miraculous image had been projected, and started to put her ear to it.
The force of the shotgun blast would have taken her head off, but the shot was high and to the right, chipping the concrete and sending it flying. Danny had hardly heard the blast when he jumped on his daughter, the memory of the Grove explosion still vivid in his memory.
In one smooth motion, he scooped Jade up in his arms while signaling for the others to run. The Mexicans scattered as another blast came—this one hitting the Virgin right in the face. The miracle was over.
They hit the car running and hopped in. It wasn’t a chopper, but Danny could still make it fly, and they peeled out long before the inevitable third blast—the one directed at them—came. But they were already far away, and the force of the shot dispersed itself into the fetid air.
“What’s happening, Danny?” asked Hope, but at this moment, he only had ears for his daughter. “What did she say, Jade?” he asked again.
“Awesome!” exclaimed Rory, as Emma began to cry.
They were traveling through a nightmare landscape. On both sides of the Golden State Freeway were acres of dead cows, cows stretching as far away as they could see, an endless silent horizontal parade of dead cows.
Poison
, he thought,
but what kind?
And how delivered? Was it in the water supply, or just in the troughs and trenches? He wanted to turn on the radio, but he needed to hear what Jade was saying first:
“Repent,” she said.
“What else?” whispered Hope.
Jade turned to the woman who would soon enough be her stepmother, even if neither of them knew that for a fact quite yet. “Nothing else,” she said.
“Repent?” asked Danny. “That’s all?”
“Repent,” she repeated. “Over and over.”
The flashing lights of the oncoming CHP cruisers rushing south gave a ghastly ambience to the scene. The sirens were deafening.
“What’s going on, Danny?” cried Hope.
“I don’t know, honey,” he said. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out his iPhone.
Under the rules, there was no way he could know if his earlier alert had gone through. He was not supposed to follow up.