This just in! At 10:42 a.m.—moments ago—an explosion shook the New York Stock Exchange, doing extensive damage, and killing an undetermined but presumably large number of people.
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Atlanta, GA, Oct. 21
When Luther Koskela arrived in Montana, his face had worn a week's growth of reddish stubble. When he arrived at the Ranch, it had had ten days more growing time. Lank, sandy-brown hair showed beneath his rolled stocking cap, and he wore a crucifix outside his shirt. He knew he didn't come across like a hippie, but neither did he fit the crewcut or skinhead image people had of mercenaries and militia.
He drove the newly bought but well-aged Ford across a cattle guard, and stopped for one of the uniformed entry guards: an Indian, who walked up to the driver's window as Lute lowered it. "This is a private road," the guard said. "Do you have a permit to drive on the Ranch?"
"Nope."
"How long do you plan to be here?"
"I don't know. A day. A couple weeks. Does the Dove come out here sometimes?"
"Not since I started work here in July. Park over there." The man pointed to a large area, leveled and gravelled. Twenty or so cars and pickups were already parked there. "That's as far as you're allowed to drive without a permit. Do you have camping gear?"
"A sleeping bag." Frowning, Lute gestured at the tent camp. "What about those? Can I use one of them?"
"They belong to people that brought them. Ask around. Maybe someone will let you stay with them. And please use the latrines. It's unsanitary to relieve yourself on the ground, and disrespectful to other people."
Koskela nodded, rolled up his window and turned into the lot. The cars already there tended to be in scattered small clusters. He parked behind one of the clusters, well away from the guards. Then he got his day pack from the back seat, slipped into the shoulder straps, and walked toward the tents, wondering what the people were like here. "Hippies" was an old term resurrected, and applied to a range of types. Those camped up here at 7,800 feet in October, he told himself, couldn't be too tender.
His watch read 11:17 a.m., and in the thin, high-elevation air, the sun was bright and warming. The temperature, he guessed, was in the fifties. He wondered what it had been at daybreak. Maybe twenty.
A few of the tents were canvas tepees, with smoke rising barely visible from their vents. He knelt outside the door of one. There was a smell of burning manure. Someone there knew the old Plains Indian practice of burning dry buffalo chips, or in these times cow chips.
"Helloo," he said. "Anybody home?"
No one answered, and he peered in. A young woman in a Navaho-style blue velvet skirt sat crosslegged like a yogi, hands loose in her lap, cupped palms upward. Her eyes were closed, her face relaxed. Meditating he realized, and went to another, where two small children played outside. They were digging in the dirt, one with a spoon, the other with a screwdriver.
"Hi!" he said to them, and they raised dirty faces to look alertly at him. "Is your dad at home?"
The elder got up and scurried to the tepee's entrance. "Dad," he called, "it's a stranger!"
A man ducked out through the opening. He was big and thick-waisted, with a pirate mustache beneath a broken nose. His forehead had encroached halfway back across his skull, but behind that his hair was long, black streaked with gray, and gathered in a ponytail.
"What can I do for you?" The man's voice was rough, and vaguely Hispanic.
"I just got here," Koskela said. "I've been hearing about this place, and the Dove, and thought I'd check it out. Just now I'm looking for someone who can tell me stuff."
"Stuff?" The tone was guarded.
"Yeah. Like what's the attraction here? Does Dove come out and talk to you guys? Does it seem like he might really be the Second Coming?"
The man grunted, then looked at the children. They were playing again. "Thurl," he called, "don' lose my screwdriver. If you do, you don' eat till you find it." He turned back to Lute. "The Dove came out once when we first come here, last June. Circulated aroun' and talked with people, then left. There was a lot more of us then. And the attraction? Depends on the person, I suppose. To me the place feels clean. Plen'y of dirt, living like this, but the vibes are clean. And Dove? I don' worry whether he's the Second Coming or the Fifth. Or just somebody spiritual, with a line to God. 'Cause he's got one; read what he says. And man, his vibes are unbelieveable! Those Indian guards have clean vibes, too. We talked to one of them, from the Yakima Nation up in Washington. Invited him to supper." The man laughed. "Kind of a hoot, white eyes like us inviting an Indian into our wigwam. He had that Ladder treatment, Life Healing, back on the reservation, and tol' us a little about it. Cindy says she'd like to try it, and I guess I would too. Maybe we will someday, when we get a little ahead on things."
He tilted his head back, and looked at the empty blue sky. "We're gonna leave this week. It's closing in on November, and up here it can snow any day now.
"I got my knee all shot to hell in the Lagos Rescue, and we lived on my partial disability money, till it got cut way back a couple years ago. Gotta cut those taxes, you know. Keep up those stock prices and executive bonuses."
He said it without heat, then shrugged. "Up here we can still live on it. We'll go back to Phoenix for the winter, and I'll work for my uncle again, cutting up scrap. It ain't much for pay, but it don' take a lot of walking around, and my uncle's a good guy to work for. He's got a mobile home he lets us use cheap, and his wife presses juice from their orange trees. Gives us all of it we want, for nothing." He shrugged again. "It ain' very exciting, but it suits us okay."
He half-turned to the tent. "Come in and meet Cindy. She ain' feeling too good today. You know how it is. But maybe she'll invite you to lunch."
Later, Koskela visited another tepee, then an ordinary walled tent and an old camper rig, killing time till nightfall. Giving his name as Lloyd Krause. Most of what he learned, he got from his lunch hosts, Al and Cindy Espinosa. What the others had to say wasn't much different. His questioning had been cautious and casual; it wouldn't do to arouse suspicion. Mostly he let the conversations take their own course, only now and then bringing up a subject.
Little of what he heard was useful, except about the guards. Apparently three were on duty at any given time—two on the gate, one on the tower, day and night. They worked three-hour shifts, alternating with six hours on standby at the guard house, for one long day and night. Then they were off for twenty-one hours. They lived at the Cote with their families.
The tower stood like a forest lookout tower without a forest, on a knob a mile inside the gate. He'd seen it on his overflights, two days earlier, and again while driving.
Koskela was uncomfortable with what he'd learned. It was no doubt honest, as far as it went, but something was missing. The Ranch was said to be four miles on a side—sixteen miles of perimeter. And with all the threats against Ngunda's life . . . Uh uh. The place was too unprotected. There was something more, something these hippies didn't know about.
Koskela had never, of course, intended to stay with anyone that night. He'd been blowing smoke, to mislead the guard. At dusk he went back to the Espinosa's tepee. He'd been invited back for supper, and intended to leave off a five-dollar bill, significant money these days. The temperature had already dropped sharply, and he stayed to talk for more than an hour after supper. The Espinosas had grown up in Phoenix, and Al's military service had been with the 5th Ranger Battalion. Koskela didn't mention his own. He told them a bit about an imaginary childhood in northern Minnesota, drawing details from time spent there as a boy, with an uncle and aunt.
After returning to his car, he sat considering for a while, the radio tuned to a country western station. He needed to walk the perimeter fence, and this was the night for it. The moon was like a fat lamp in the clear sky, only one night past full. But a major part of the perimeter would be visible from the tower. What did they have up there for night surveillance? Hell, even he had night goggles and night glasses in his pack.
By nature and training, he preferred more data before acting, but saw no prospect of getting it except by sticking his neck out. So after a few minutes, he switched his dome light to the off setting, got out of his car, and closed the door without slamming it. After putting on his recreational day pack, he crossed the road, walking through the camp and a hundred feet beyond it before donning his night goggles. Then, for two hours he hiked within sight of the fence, west two miles to a fence corner, then four miles south to the next, then east, fast and steady. After the first hour he gave little attention to the tower.
He found nothing interesting, except that the fence showed no sign at all of being electronically rigged. It was ordinary stock fence—barbed wire fastened to steel T-posts driven into the earth. No doubt by a sweating cowboy wielding a heavy post driver. He'd done enough of that himself as a teenager, on his dad's ranch, and his uncles', and for hire by neighbors. Crossing that fence would take no effort at all: spread the top two strands of wire and duck through, or flatten yourself and crawl under.
At a point opposite the encampment, he saw little reason to continue his perimeter inspection. He'd seen all of it he needed to. So he left the fence and started north.
All in all, the ground sloped gradually downward toward the east, but superposed on that tendency, it was undulant to rolling. He knew his next objective—a low bluff overlooking the Cote on the southeast—and he went to it. There he spent an hour on his belly, studying the place house by house through his 6X night glasses. A few windows were still lit, along with occasional streetlamps, but he saw not a single headlight. So, no patrol cars. And nothing that looked like surveillance equipment. Only the community's satellite dish, on the roof of the three-story brick building he assumed was Millennium headquarters. Any surveillance equipment would be on the tower a mile north.
Hell, he thought, maybe Carl could have done it; knocked on the door and stepped in shooting. But he didn't believe it; not for a minute.
The major question left was where, down there, Ngunda lived. The Cote hadn't been there when the aerial photography was flown, and he'd kept his own overflights as innocuous and incidental-seeming as possible. Once across at a slow eighty knots—an orientation pass—and once back, a quarter-hour later, both at 2,000 feet local reference.
Now he felt more confident of what he'd seen. One house, one of the smaller, was a little separated from the rest. The trees and shrubs around it were larger, as if bigger stock had been planted, and it was one of the nearest to the big brick building. Ngunda's house, he felt sure.
There was no point in freezing on the ground any longer. Stowing the night glasses in his pack, he put his goggles back on. Then, at a jog, he started back to his car, swinging well east, to keep distance between himself and the tower.