It couldn’t be much wilder, Tom thought. Christ, what a mix-up—Wild West and wild Serengeti!
They came to a dirt road a couple of miles inland, rutted clay scattered with gravel on a low embankment, flanked by ditches and tall posts carrying wires.
Adrienne pointed southward along the dirt road. “That’s Highway One,” she said. “It’s paved from San Diego to the oil wells and refinery at Long Beach; then it heads north, inland for a way, up to San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles. In theory you could drive all the way from San Diego to the geyser country north of Napa—but a lot of it’s rough, not easily motorable like this.”
“It’s all what you’re used to,” Tom said gravely. And I’ve seen better roads than this in Afghanistan, for God’s sake.
After that the vegetation grew thicker again; for a couple of miles they traveled single-file through stands of castor-bean plant mixed with wild black mustard in a tangle that that ranged from six feet in height to ten; small yellow flowers were still blooming at the end of the mustard’s short branches. After the first few hundred yards it was like riding through neck-deep water that occasionally closed over his head—although water wouldn’t make you sneeze, which the pollen from the mustard did—or between rustling walls along a laneway barely wide enough for a horse and rider.
“Careful, big Tom,” Simmons said on his way back to check on the mules.
“Here be tigers?” he replied.
Adrienne answered for him: “The place is lousy with them. Also grizzly bears and lions. Cape buffalo and American bison, and the odd rhino too; and up ahead”—she pointed southeast—“is the Winkpar.”
“Which means?”
“The Indian word was pwinukipar, or something like that. It means ‘many waters’ or ‘big swamp.’ Hippos. Elephants. Crocs.”
“Right where Las Cienegas was, right?”
Before that became a main Los Angeles highway, it had been what its Spanish name meant—“swamps.”
“Right. But it’s not just one big block—there are little sloughs and seepage springs all over the country between the river and the Santa Monicas. Excuse me, between the river and the Krugersberg.”
“Well, that adds a certain charm to a ride in the night,” Tom said, and they smiled at each other in the rustling dimness.
And oddly enough, it’s true, he thought, feeling himself warmed. Although if I’m going to be charged by a rhino, better while riding a Hummer than a horse.
They moved on through the night, stopping every hour or so for ten minutes’ rest and switching horses every two. He used the intervals to stretch, grunting a little as he forced head to knee. Mosquitoes grew more common as they skirted the huge swamp to their south; it made him glad he’d had the malaria cellular vaccine just before he left the army. The marshes covered scores of square miles, even toward the end of the summer drought—and so did groves of trees on their edges, sycamores and big cottonwoods and willows mostly, with oaks and California walnut; the shade grew dense enough that everyone put their night-sight goggles back on. They were riding through an open gallery forest most of the time; the problem was that there were patches and outliers of the marsh, where streams ran downhill from the Santa Monicas or underground rock ledges forced the already-high water table to the surface. Those produced jungle, an impenetrable lacework of creepers and California rose. Sometimes you couldn’t go around.
He dismounted at a hand gesture and unlimbered the machete from his saddle. “Now this takes me back,” he said, as he took his turn.
The blade was a slightly flared rectangle of good steel, heavy and sharp; he waded in, reminding himself that they needed a path wide enough for horses, not just men. Brushwood and branches and thorny vines fell with a ssss-chunk! as he struck with blows that might have been timed by metronome, flicking or kicking the cut stems aside when he had to. The ground turned muddy under his feet, but they didn’t come to an actual river, just a laneway of lower growth that carried the overflow of the winter storms down from the mountains. Sweat ran down his face and flanks and back as he breathed deeply with the exertion, an agreeable enough sensation—which wasn’t something he’d ever thought he’d say about breathing in the LA basin! Back FirstSide, he’d be choking on the air….
Henry Villers came up to spell him. “Nice job,” he said. “I thought you did your fighting in dry places, Warden Tom.”
“Mostly—Euphrates to Hindu Kush, with excursions north. But my battalion got sent to the Philippines for a while during the war—Abu Sayyef tried a revival. Jungle work.”
“What happened?”
Tom grimaced. “Some of us died. All of them died… not a happy time. At least it isn’t raining here, and there aren’t many civilians to get caught in the cross fire.”
“I was a dry-area fighter myself,” the black man said; he took over, competently enough, if without the machine accuracy and strength of the ex-Ranger.
“Kuwait?”
“Gulf War One, right,” Villers said. “Marines—we did the ‘hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle’ part while you army pukes played at being Rommel’s Desert Rats.”
“Ah… I think Rommel was the Desert Fox and fought the Desert Rats,” he said, hesitating until Villers turned and grinned at him over his shoulder.
“Man, you fell for that one! I hung out with some Brits during the buildup; they still have that dumb-ass rodent painted on their tanks.”
Tom nodded acknowledgment at the hit. “What was your MOS, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Hey, every marine’s a rifleman—even the women. Seriously, it was infantry—I carried the squad’s Minimi,” Villers said; that meant he’d been a machine gunner. “Anyway, it wasn’t much of a war. Never saw anyone so anxious to surrender as those Homers. Taking care of them slowed us down worse than fighting would have.”
“Best kind of war,” Tom said sincerely. “Even better if you’re piloting a Predator through a satellite uplink from Florida.”
“Right on, brother,” Villers said, panting, dropping back to let Schalk Botha replace him at the front. “Christ, I’m thirty-eight and I feel every year of it. Should have spent more time in the hills hunting deer this spring.”
All the men took turns at the clearing, until they were up and through the slough and into more of the cottonwood forest.
“We’ll camp here,” Botha said. “We’ll need firewood—”
“And I’ll help put up the tents,” Henry Villers said smoothly, with a toothy smile.
Tom filled in the unspoken codicil and smiled to himself: Draw your own water, Mr. Boer, and hew your own wood.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
