Sedona Conspiracy

CHAPTER ONE ^{LIGHTS IN THE CANYON}

The rain started at midnight, and by eight in the morning was still coming down in sheets. It was one thunderstorm after another as a line of cells moved through the Sedona area. A thousand waterfalls cascaded down red rock buttes surrounding town, and thick mist shrouded the canyons.

Martin looked out his motel room window towards the southwest. “Might be brightening up out there. Let’s get going.”

Doug was lying on his bed, watching CNN. “I’d rather go to town. Red dirt can suck your boots off after a rain.”

“Don’t you back out on me,” warned Martin. “The permit’s for one night, and I didn’t drive a hundred miles to shop for new-age junk. Up-and-on, before trailhead parking fills up.”

Breakfast was two power bars; they picked up coffee at The Planet, and then made the short drive west into the butte country. Boynton Canyon was the most popular trail, but as they’d hoped the trailhead parking area was empty, people scared off by the rain. Even in their four-by-four the red hardpan in the lot had turned to mud slippery as ice.

Rain lessened to mist by the time their packs were on and the car locked. The sky was definitely lightening up in the southwest, but only a hundred yards along the trail red muck was already reaching their bootlaces. They slogged to Katchina Woman, a spire sacred to the Apache. A gnarled tree there was said to be a vortex site that concentrated local magnetic energies. New age folk came there to meditate. Doug was into the local culture, and wanted to pause for a quiet moment, but Martin insisted they press on and he promised they’d stop on the way back in the morning.

The first mile was a boring slog, squishing through muck on the flats, then up steep rock pouring water on their boots as they skirted the edge of a resort with lawns and expensive condos right up to the wilderness boundary. A faint side trail leading up to nicely preserved cliff dwellings was now a waterfall, and so they headed straight into the canyon and the quiet serenity two miles beyond the wilderness boundary sign. Canyon walls were first distant, then close, towering masses of red rock turning pink and orange in the diffused light, colors that artists often struggled to duplicate.

The sky brightened above them, and the summits to their right glowed orange. A soft breeze chilled their faces and filled them with the scents of pine and mesquite. Ahead, through a tangle of trees, they could see rough cliffs and jumbled spires at the canyon’s end. They came to the clearing where they would camp for the night. Logs had been placed in a large square there, a pile of stones making an energy pyramid at its center.

The tent was up in minutes, gear stowed and stove gassed. With the day brightening, Martin and Doug slung daypacks and headed to trail’s end up a steep, scree slope at the headwall half a mile from their camp. On a shelf high above the canyon floor they munched trail mix and watched the colors change with progression of the day. A dozen red-rock cairns graced the shelf around them, all placed during someone’s spiritual moment. The two men sat silently; in this magical place, there seemed no need to talk.

So it was that when the sound came, the shock of it made their hearts hammer hard.

It filled their ears, and the rock slab beneath them vibrated noticeably. It was as if a commercial jet was taking off just behind them, but there were only towers of rock there, and beyond those a wilderness of buttes and mesquite-covered flats.

“Jesus!” shouted Doug, and clapped hands over his ears.

The sound went on for several seconds, and cut off as sharply as it had begun.

“Airport’s the other direction,” said Martin, and pointed east towards Sedona, “and they don’t let anything that big come in anyway.”

“I still hear something,” said Doug.

There was a faint whine, lowering in pitch, then a rattling sound, but in a few seconds the complete silence of the canyon had returned.

“I want to take a look,” said Martin, and stood up to hoist his daypack.

“Climb to the top?” Doug shook his head. “It’s off trail, and straight up.”

“Maybe. We have the time.”

“Four miles to the car is a long crawl with a broken leg.”

“Well, I’m not going to be stupid about it. Come on.” Martin started across a faint game trail on a shelf inclined upwards along the sheer wall above them. “We’ll follow the animals.”

Doug followed reluctantly. All he’d come for was quiet contemplation in a sacred place, not a rock climb. But the sound intrigued him, excited him, for there were many stories about strange happenings in the canyons and on certain buttes. New age poppycock, many said, but what he’d heard was the sound of a jet or even a rocket engine in the middle of a wilderness, and it had been real enough.

They only climbed for half an hour before giving up. The game trail faded to nothing at a foot-wide ledge, crossed a sheer wall with a fifty-foot drop to a boulder field, and they didn’t even have a rope. They bouldered up a hanging canyon next to the wall, but were stopped in the end by smooth towers rising another hundred feet. No hand or foot holds, no cracks, straight up. They stood there in frustration, for beyond the tops of the towers there were faint sounds again: a steady, muffled beat of some kind of engine, and a hammering sound like someone cracking concrete.

“Must be a ranch out there,” said Martin. “Maybe someone’s digging a well.”

“With a jet engine?” said Doug.

“No, but this is a waste of time; we can’t get any higher, and I want to look for ruins on the other side of the canyon this afternoon. Let’s go down.”

“Fine with me. I’m gonna tell Bob Terrell about this when we get back to town.”

“The UFO guy? Don’t even tell him I was with you.”

“Not just UFO sightings. Military base stories, too, maybe fifty years back.”

“He makes a good living writing books about it. That’s your thing, Doug, not mine. I wasn’t with you. Got it?”

“Sure,” said Doug, and smiled. “I can’t help it if you don’t have any imagination.”

They picked their way down over boulders and scree, and spent the afternoon brush busting the other side of the canyon to find one old Yavapai site on a ledge forty feet above the floor, but finding it made Martin’s day complete.

Dusk was early in the canyon, and they’d seen no other hikers during the day. Sprinkles continued off and on until dark. They ate a freeze-dried stew dinner at five, read paperbacks by flashlight, and turned in at nine. Sleep came quickly in a place without even birdsong at night, but it seemed only minutes later they were startled awake by a sound immediately familiar to them, and a bright flash of light washed over their tent.

“Helicopter?” said Doug in the darkness. “Sounds close.”

Martin was already out of his bag and crawling outside. “Lights up above the headwall. Hovering right now. Sure sounds like a helicopter.”

Doug crawled out of the tent behind Martin, and looked up. The canyon headwall loomed above them, a black silhouette seen through the bare branches of deciduous trees. Bright lights flickered in and out there, one very bright, a V-shaped pattern of six red, fainter lights below it. The pattern seemed to rotate while the two men watched, and once again the bright light flashed over their tent.

Doug blinked, eyes adjusting quickly to darkness again. He pointed. “There, above that center peak. See the dark shape?”

“I see it. Helicopter, all right. A big one, and something is hanging beneath it.”

Whatever it was headed west at that instant and was lost from view, the flup-flup engine sound fading, then gone.

“Oh, boy,” said Doug.

Martin sighed. “Don’t even get started. Some kind of construction going on over there. No little green men, just a helicopter carrying a prefab wall, or something.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Why not?”

They crawled back into their sacks. Doug was bursting to talk about what they’d seen, but Martin was snoring the instant his head hit the pillow. Doug didn’t drift off for nearly an hour, his senses on high alert, but eventually he succumbed to a light sleep, once or twice barely awakening to what he thought might be helicopter sounds again, and the second time it was already starting to get light.

They slept in longer than they’d planned to, and hurriedly broke camp around nine. The tent was folded, ready to be rolled up, and they were stuffing their packs when Martin heard a crunch and looked up to see two men descending the trail from the headwall. They moved lightly and balanced, a mark of experienced mountaineers, hair long and tied in ponytails. They saw Martin and smiled, stopped on the trail a few yards from the campsite and exchanged sips on a single water bottle between them. The taller of the two spoke, the other just listened. Both men gave Martin a steady gaze with startlingly blue eyes.

“You camp here last night?”

“Yep. Came up yesterday morning. You must have come in before dawn.”

“Pretty close to it. Nice hike. I didn’t know camping was allowed in here. Beautiful place for it.”

“Pretty limited, but you can get a permit at the Ranger’s station.”

“Nice looking rock here,” said the taller man, and his partner nodded in agreement. “We’ll have to bring our gear next time. Bet it’s real quiet here at night.”

“It was last night. Slept like a baby,” said Martin, and cast a sidelong glance at Doug, who was staring at him.

The taller man capped his water bottle and stuffed it into his partner’s rucksack. “Well, you have a nice walk out, now. Couple more canyons we want to see today.”

A friendly wave, and the two men turned back to the trail, walking with a brisk pace until they were out of sight in the trees.

“Slept like a baby, huh,” said Doug.

“After a while,” said Martin, and smiled.

Martin was strangely silent on the way back, and seemed to be studying the trail all the way. Walking was easier than it had been the day before, but the trail was still spongy from all the rain. They stopped at Katchina Woman, and Doug spent half an hour meditating by the gnarled tree said to be a focus of magnetic energies in the region.

By the time they got back to the car, people were already coming in on the trail and the parking lot was full. The two hikers they’d seen at their campsite were not there. Martin dumped their packs into the four-by-four and offered Doug a drink of water.

Doug took a sip, then, “Okay, what’s going on? You haven’t said more than ten words on the trail today.”

Martin frowned. “I was studying the trail. Noticed our tennis shoe tracks from yesterday, saw some fainter boot tracks going out. Our tracks were fainter, too. Ground’s not so soft today.”

“So?”

Martin paused, then looked at Doug darkly. “Those guys we met at camp this morning didn’t come into the canyon this morning, at least not from this parking lot, and I’m not aware of any other trail in. They came in from somewhere up by the headwall. Now, I ask, how would they do that?”

“And why?” said Doug, and smiled. “I’m telling all of this to Bob Terrell before we leave town, Martin, but I promise I won’t mention your name.”

“Okay,” said Martin.

They got into the four-by-four and drove back to town to find Terrell.