Counterplay

20

The throbbing pulse of the drums rolling across the high plains desert from the pueblo dictated the pace and nature of Marlene’s sleep. Even the people in her dreams danced like Indians with stylized tribal masks of carved wood and feathers.

Despite the disguises, she knew who was behind the masks. Kane’s demonic mask seemed to shift, his body a formless smoke, as he pursued Lucy, who wore a Corn Maiden mask and was dressed in a fringed white doeskin dress and knee-high white doeskin boots.

Butch danced after them in a Great Horned Owl mask that Jojola had once shown her, which was used by the tribe’s warrior clan, while David Grale stamped along behind him wearing the gray-brown, mud-covered mask of a water spirit. Swirling around all of them was a woman, or the shadow of a woman in black whose raven mask covered only the top part of her face; Marlene assumed from the mole on her cheek that she was Samira Azzam.

Moving in and out of the assemblage, John Jojola soared and screeched like the golden eagle he represented. Eagles, Marlene thought in her dream, John believes that they carry prayers to the Creator. The sight of the Indian police chief filled her with such an overwhelming sadness that she cried out in her sleep. Hearing her, he turned and winked before flapping his great wings and rising above the dancers, circling up and up until he was lost in the sun.

Then Vladimir Karchovski appeared in the middle of the dancers. He was not dressed differently than he would have been for any of his summertime walks along the Brighton Beach boardwalk, just the usual linen suit and black beret. He gazed fondly at Marlene as he did whenever she came to visit, and held up a piece of paper.

Before she could reach out and take it, however, a shadow passed between them and stole the note. Marlene realized that the shadow was Azzam, who began trilling in the way of Arab women who have lost their men, circling the old man like a-

“-vulture, not a raven,” Marlene said aloud as she sat up in the dark of the room of the mission house where she was staying on the Taos reservation.

She got out of bed and walked over to the door leading to the Spanish-style courtyard outside her room. The stars overhead shone brilliantly-not the weary specks of light she was used to in the East, but three-dimensional bodies of light that had substance and dimension. “Billions and billions of stars,” she said as she entered the courtyard and sat down in a hanging chair next to a large clump of lilac bushes. The fragrance of the tiny lavender flowers permeated the predawn morning.

The drums from the pueblo were growing louder and seemed to be trying to match the syncopation of her heart…or maybe it’s my heart trying to keep the beat. Holding her breath to listen, she heard the far-off high-pitched keening and chanted songs as the people of the Taos Pueblo mourned the death of their police chief and warrior John Jojola. A coyote’s howl joined in the grieving from a bluff near the house.

She would have liked to have attended the funeral. But it was a private ceremony, part of the sacred rituals that the Taos Indians had kept secret from all outsiders ever since the Spanish conquistadores arrived in 1540.

The pueblo was thought to be the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America, and its people had been one of the only tribes that had not been forced from their lands by other Indians or whites. The seven pueblos in the Rio Grande Valley, of which Taos was the best known, even spoke a unique language, Tewa. They didn’t teach the language to anyone else. However, Marlene’s daughter, Lucy, a language savant, had a passing knowledge of it from listening to conversations as she helped out at the Catholic mission on the Taos reservation.

Even allowing Marlene to stay in a house on the reservation’s Catholic mission grounds was a breach in tradition while the reservation’s borders were closed to outsiders, as they were now. When she was dropped off at the house, she’d been told, politely, that she was to remain in the house until someone from the tribe arrived to escort her to the memorial service in the morning, now only a few hours away.

Closing the reservation to everyone except the Red Willow People, as the Taos people were known, wasn’t unusual. It happened several times during the year for special ceremonies, as well as for most of the winter. About fifty families, including Jojola and his son, lived year-round in the actual pueblo-an apartment-like complex as high as five stories made of adobe, a mixture of mud and straw, that had been there for perhaps as long as a thousand years. Most of the rest of the tribe’s population of nearly two thousand lived in houses and trailers scattered around the reservation. During the winter and on festival days, many of the families living outside moved into their ancestral homes in the pueblo to touch base as a people and pass on their extensive oral history to their children and grandchildren. The ceremonies and dances performed in those times were for themselves, not the tourists with their cameras.

The reservation was also closed sometimes during times of community trauma, or to discuss matters important to the future of the Taos people, or to mourn the passing of a leader like Jojola. At the word from the tribal council, police officers wearing the traditional black skirts over their pants maintained roadblocks at the reservation entrances and patrolled the roads to keep the curious and un-invited away.

Marlene knew that decision to let her stay she owed to the legacy of Jojola, and the thought of her friend’s death brought tears to her eyes again. He’d once told her that he didn’t fear death because it represented only the passing of his spirit from one world into the next. But it wasn’t a world she could enter, not without leaving her family, and she missed her friend. The lethal rage she felt toward Kane, the old street justice anger at injustice and the evil of men who perpetrated it-an anger she’d tried to leave in the past with Jojola’s help-threatened to blind her at a time she needed to stay levelheaded to protect her family.

The morning after Jojola’s death, she’d flown to Albuquerque where she was met by a Taos County sheriff’s deputy who drove her to the town of Taos. She’d insisted on going straight to the hospital where she found Lucy sitting in a chair asleep with her head on Ned’s chest.

Ned had been wide awake but trying not to disturb her daughter. Hello, Mrs. Ciampi, he whispered when she walked in the room.

Hi, cowboy, heard you’ve been taking on the James Gang.

The young man blushed. Tell the truth, I was scared, but it was either fight or die, he said. Lucy was the brave one. And John and Tran who got there just in time…for us.

And that, of course, is pure hogwash, said Lucy, who’d awakened. Ned was better than John Wayne ever dreamed of being.

Ned was now turning a dangerous shade of bright red, which only got worse when Marlene kissed him on the cheek. Thank you for saving my daughter’s life…again.

Lucy burst into tears. But John died saving us. They’d all cried then, even Ned.

What about Tran? Marlene asked, wiping her eyes.

He’s okay, Lucy sniffed. You know Tran. He didn’t want to be there when John’s men showed up. I think he’s gone back to New York.

She’d left Lucy with Ned, not that she would have been able to coax her away, and was driven to the house on the reservation, where she’d called her husband. She’d told him that Jojola would have understood, but in reality she was relieved that Butch had remained in New York. Her relationship with Jojola-call it teacher to student, brother to sister, one old soul to another-had been a private one, and she preferred to say good-bye to him in her own way. When the memorial service was over, she hoped to watch the sunset on a rock outcropping above the Rio Grande Gorge where they’d spent many hours talking.

A thin gray line was separating the sky from the black silhouette of the mountains to the east, and the coyote howled again, much closer. Getting up from her chair, she wondered if she might see the animal if she went over to the gate leading to the desert beyond the courtyard. In Indian folklore, the coyote was known as the trickster-always playing practical jokes, not all of which turned out well for himself or his subjects. Jojola had a special affinity for the animal.

A second coyote howled, only differently. She hesitated, the second coyote sounded to her like a person trying to imitate a coyote. Slipping into her room, she retrieved her gun from beneath the pillow on her bed and returned to the courtyard. Marlene aimed at the gate. Then a voice said, “Oh please don’t shoot honorable Vietnamese man, Missy.” The voice’s owner laughed.

“Tran! Goddammit,” Marlene whispered, trying not to wake the Franciscan monks who lived in the house. “I might have shot you!”

She ran up and threw her arms around the thin shoulders of the former schoolteacher turned Vietcong leader turned gangster. A sob escaped her. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

Tran shrugged. “What is death? You’re talking to a Buddhist. This was preordained, his karma; he will return soon in another body to continue the journey. His own beliefs also had him on this path where death is only a doorway into the next room.”

“Nice you can be so matter-of-fact about it,” Marlene sniffed.

“I miss him, too,” Tran said. “We still had many things to talk about…some issues still to resolve from our old enmity. But there is nothing I can do; it was his fate. I expect to meet him somewhere down the road so we can continue our discussion and friendship. I expect you will find him in the future as well.”

Tran nodded toward her room. “John’s men are spread out all around here and a snake couldn’t get through without them knowing. But Kane has eyes and ears all over this town.”

Once they were in the room, Tran described what happened after they discovered the dead agents. “They looked like they’d been dead for at least an hour, maybe more,” he said, “and I was worried we might already be too late. But then I heard the shooting from the direction of the cabin, which meant someone was still fighting. As John thought when he talked to you, we couldn’t get through to his office on his cell phone.”

With the sun setting, they’d driven the remaining few miles to the cabin until reaching the last hill providing cover and hid Jojola’s truck off the road. “I was surprised that they’d left no one to guard the rear, but I don’t think that they expected Ned to put up such a fight. We were about a mile away, but the first thing we saw was a truck overturned off the road with several bodies lying around.”

There seemed to be a lull in the fighting, which they thought meant that the terrorists were waiting for it to get completely dark. “Which gave us about a half hour to cover the mile between us and them without being spotted,” Tran said.

By following ravines and moving from rock outcropping or patch of mesquite brush to the next, they’d made it to within fifty yards of the attackers without being noticed. But they still weren’t close enough. The only weapons they had were Jojola’s police department-issued 9 mm Glock in the glove box, which he gave to Tran, and his hunting bow and hunting knife. None of the weapons had the range to be of much use against automatic rifles, which meant they too were going to have to wait until dark to close with the enemy.

They split up; agreeing that their signal to attack would be when the assault on the cabin commenced. “It wasn’t going to be easy,” Tran continued. “We were moving in the dark, but we had seen that the attackers had night-vision goggles. I was lucky that their attention was focused on Ned and Lucy because there was a patch of open ground I had to cover and would have surely been seen if they were looking behind them.”

However, the attackers were caught off guard when one of their number who’d crept up close to the cabin was shot and killed by Ned. “He barely made it back to the cabin.”

The action had then moved quickly. Under covering fire, the main body of attackers began to rush forward. Then someone inside the cabin-“I learned later it was Lucy”-shot a flare into the bales of hay. “Two guys got caught in the open and Ned picked them off like shooting fish in a barrel.

“I saw the hay bales catch fire, and I took off running to reach my targets,” Tran said. “The first guy heard me coming, but I think the fire had also ruined his night vision because he was looking right at me but his shots went wide. I shot him and didn’t stop running until I got to the next guy, who never saw me coming.”

Jojola had also sprung into action. His first target was a man kneeling next to a rock and firing at the house, trying to keep Ned pinned while the others rushed in. The former commando didn’t bother to use an arrow but instead drove his knife into the base of the man’s skull as he ran past.

Notching an arrow as he moved, Jojola shot another of the terrorists just as the man was throwing a grenade at the cabin. Instead of going through the window the device-“a flash-bang type”-bounced off the outer wall and exploded. “Lucy believes that the men had orders to try to take her alive.

“Another terrorist reached the door and appeared about to shoot when John put an arrow through his chest. Then it was over, or so we thought.”

The man Jojola had shot was still alive, but he refused to answer questions Lucy put to him in Arabic, Chechen, and Russian. “We were stupid. We failed to check him for a secreted weapon,” Tran said sadly, not quite as much the Buddhist as his initial comments to Marlene.

Suddenly, the terrorist had raised a small pistol he’d palmed and pointed it at Lucy. Poshyelk chyerto, he’d cursed her.

“John was closest and jumped in front of her,” Tran said. “He took the bullet before I could knock the gun from his hand.”

Marlene wiped at her eyes and nodded. That part she’d heard from Lucy.

Jojola had died instantly. With her dead friend in her arms, according to Tran, Lucy said something back to the man in Russian.

“I asked her what the man had said,” Tran recalled. “He’d told her to go to hell. I asked what she’d said back…. She told him that a saint had just informed her that there was a special place already reserved there for him and other murderers. I’ve never seen a man’s face so terrified, and that’s how he looked when he died a minute later.”

Jojola’s men had arrived soon after. Together they’d searched the dead and found a packet of documents on a man they figured was the leader that included a photograph of Ned and one of Jojola.

“The two white knights,” Marlene said. She told Tran about the latest chess pieces and her run-in with the terrorists in New York.

“Well, if someone’s trying to warn you that an attack is imminent, they need to work a little faster,” Tran said. “The three of us only survived because of the fight the kid put up. I have no doubt that the plan was to swoop in, kill Ned, and kill or abduct Lucy, after which they would have waited for John to arrive. I don’t think they knew I was with him.”

“So maybe Kane sent the knights, knowing he could count on me calling John to go check on her,” Marlene said.

“Or, anybody watching John for the past few months would have known that he looked in on the kids every couple of days,” Tran said.

Jojola’s men had taken his body with them to the reservation to be buried by his people before federal agents arrived. “I’m told that the guy with Homeland Security was ticked off and gave John’s guys a hard time for ‘disturbing a crime scene.’ They told him to go screw himself and that they were following their customs, which prohibit autopsies,” Tran said. “This is all secondhand. I wasn’t hanging around; as you know, I’m not fond of federal agents, especially right now.”

“You suspect a traitor?”

“Well, something’s fishy,” Tran answered. “The federal agents who got shot were set up. How else would professionals allow two truckloads of armed men to drive up and shoot them without a fight?”

“Maybe someone else got there first and shot them before the trucks arrived,” Marlene suggested.

“We thought of that, too,” Tran said. “But Ned saw the trucks approaching and then heard the shooting. And don’t forget the murder of Fey. Someone told the killer where to find him and that was something only the federal agencies had knowledge of. There’s one more thing, John’s guys swear that the photograph the terrorists had of him had been taken for his police identification card, which they said was only on file in their office and with the FBI…. I don’t think they were likely to give it to anyone; they loved that man.”

“I did, too,” Marlene said. “And karma or not, Buddhist or Indian spirituality or not, I’m going to do my best to kill the bastard who did this…. Jaxon thinks there’s a mole in either his agency or Homeland Security, too.”

She recalled a conversation she’d had with the agent that afternoon. It was believed that the terrorists had entered New Mexico from Mexico near the town of Gallup.

About thirty thousand people are caught sneaking across the border there every year; many more aren’t apprehended, Jaxon had said. Most of them are just poor laborers trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. However, it’s also popular with drug smugglers and apparently, as we just found out, terrorists. Two men with the Minuteman organization-a bunch of civilians down on the border trying to help the Border Patrol spot illegals-disappeared about five days ago, their bodies were found this morning; they’d been shot to death. Probably stumbled on the terrorists and paid the price.

The deaths of the Homeland Security agents were being kept very hush-hush. Jon Ellis, who’d arrived in town with Jaxon, was positive that his men had been ambushed before the truckloads of terrorists arrived. He’d even questioned whether Jojola was playing “both sides of the field” until Marlene had angrily straightened him out.

Did they give you stupid pills? she’d said. My friend died saving my daughter and her boyfriend after your guys were caught asleep at the wheel. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead-those two men are gone and can’t defend themselves-but you have to wonder why they’re sitting there like clay pigeons when they’re supposed to be keeping an eye on my daughter.

Jaxon started to intervene, but Ellis apologized. It’s okay, she’s right. He added, I’m asking myself those same questions.

Tran nodded and thought for a moment. A coyote howled outside the gate. “I have to go,” he said. “I’m leaving for New York; you know how to contact me there. But I wanted to warn you. The hospital is being watched. The reservation is being watched. You’ve been followed since you got to Albuquerque. So far these watchers haven’t tried to infiltrate the reservation, and it wouldn’t be healthy for them if they did. But take care, Marlene. Trust no one.”

Marlene hugged her old friend again. “Thank you, Tran,” she said. “In case I’ve never told you, I love you, too. So be careful; I couldn’t stand to have you both on the road without me.”

Tran nodded and smiled. She thought there was even a hint of a tear in his eye as he led the way out of her room. “Don’t grieve too much,” he said, turning to her. “We need to look ahead, not behind. I suspect there will be many surprises still in store for all of us before this is over.”

With that, the former guerrilla slipped out of the gate and into the gray light just before the dawn. A coyote, the one who sounded like a man imitating a coyote, howled and was answered from farther away by, she thought, the real animal.

Out in the sagebrush, a shadow emerged and joined Tran. “You need to work on your coyote-speak, my friend,” the shadow whispered, “she almost shot you.”